KPM Berlin - Cup - Porcelain

Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur (KPM) view cup with a Berlin veduta of the Old Museum, circa 1830. Bell-shaped beaker with a handle drawn up and terminating in a shell palmette. Frontally, gold-framed polychrome fine painting with flanking foliate motifs. 10 cm high, 8.5 cm in diameter. No painter's mark, inscribed on the base with “Das Museum in Berlin” and bearing the Zepter crest of the 1830s.

- Gold adornment somewhat worn, concealed lateral hairline, minimal chip at the rim, fine painting in excellent condition.

- The Birth of Spree Athens -

With the completion of the building now referred to as the Old Museum, the initial structure of the Berlin Museum Island, in 1830, the now-restored palace gained a bourgeois counterpart. Between the palace and the Musentempel designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel lies the pleasure garden also laid out by the architect. Modeled after the Greek Agora, it is conceived as a place of contemplative promenade. Accordingly, the veduta shows contemporaries strolling, dressed in top hat and tailcoat, behind whom the newly opened museum unfolds in all its classical grandeur. The Dioskuren crowning the Musentempel rise in silhouette against the blue sky. The precise polychrome painting of the unique piece is not only an outstanding Berlin-historical document from the period shortly after the museum’s opening, but the finest hatching resembles Schinkel’s own drawings, bringing his architectural masterpiece into a harmonious representation.