The Arcanum (10 page)

In order to preserve this art as much as possible a secret, the fabric at Meissen
…
is rendered impenetrable to any but those who are immediately employed about the work, and the secret of mixing and preparing
the metal is known to very Jew of them. They are all confined as prisoners, and subject to be arrested if they go without
the walls; and consequently a chapel and everything necessary is provided within.

J
ONAS
H
ANWAY,
An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea,
1752

S
uccess did not come easily despite the royal fanfare. In the first years after the move to the Albrechtsburg, Böttger was
beset by a seemingly endless string of difficulties as the factory's survival teetered precariously in the balance.

Money was a constant source of worry. Böttger, as factory administrator, had to shoulder personal responsibility for the factory's
debts. Although a talented chemist, he was hopelessly disorganized when it came to financial matters; no proper factory accounts
were kept and his muddled personal debts became irretrievably intertwined with those of the factory. The king was supposed
to pay him a salary to cover living expenses and costs, but this seems to have been paid in full only sporadically. Subsequent
biographers unsympathetic to Böttger's cause have accused him of fiddling the books for his own ends, but it seems more probable
that the discrepancies were simply the result of Böttger's financial naïveté and chaotic administrative skills, and the duplicity
of those like Nehmitz who were quick to take advantage of his failings.

The king was often away for months at a time in Warsaw and the wages of his other factory employees frequently went unpaid.
Even when he did deign to send instructions to his chancellor in Dresden to meet outstanding debts, money was still often
withheld because the king's finances too were in desperate disarray. The nonpayment of wages caused obvious hardship and unrest
among the hard-driven staff, who were still kept as virtual prisoners in the Meissen precincts and officially forbidden to
come and go as they pleased. Forced to work for weeks, sometimes months, on end for no pay, they became audacious and lawless.
On one occasion they ignored the usual restrictions and abandoned their jobs at Meissen, marched to Dresden and confronted
the king during his leisurely morning ride. On this occasion their wages were paid but they were not always so lucky.

Michael Nehmitz, the head of the commission appointed by Augustus to monitor progress, was a continual source of irritation
and one of the chief causes of the factory financial concerns. By failing to pass on Böttger's letters or to relay messages,
by endlessly criticizing him to the king with exaggerated accounts of his drunkenness and his mismanagement of the factory,
he caused damaging friction between Augustus and Böttger and further distrust among the workers. It was later to emerge that
much of the money that he claimed Böttger had misappropriated had in fact gone to line his own pocket.

Although Böttger had been appointed the factory administrator, he was still forcibly held in Dresden, because the king still
expected him to find the formula for gold. Separation from the factory meant that he was unable properly to monitor its day-to-day
running or the training of staff. In all he is known to have made only five visits to Meissen, obviously a hopelessly inadequate
state of affairs for the smooth running of a still nascent industry. His first visit took place in July 1710, a month after
the factory's inception; the second was a year later in the autumn of 1711 when Böttger, by now accustomed to a relatively
comfortable life in Dresden, brought with him a decorator to improve the spartan interiors at the Albrechtsburg.

From the start at Meissen there were also serious problems with production. A new, larger kilnhouse had been promised in vacant
rooms that once had been occupied by the local magistrates' court. Dr. Bartholmäi had made detailed studies of foreign kilns
in order to improve on the inefficient design of the ones at the Jungfernbastei in Dresden, which were still far too small
for full-scale commercial production as well as being impossible to regulate with any accuracy. The difficulties of this hit-and-miss
method, without any form of accurate temperature gauge, in which heat was regulated by the supply of oxygen to the furnace,
had led Tschirnhaus to christen the Dresden kilns “the bowl of chance.” Here too, however, shortage of money hampered progress,
and by 1711 the position had gotten so bad that building of the new kiln at Meissen had been stopped altogether.

There were also endless irritating delays caused by arguments with the cathedral chapter. The cathedral of Meissen was enclosed
within the same fortifications as the castle and shared the same entrance and large courtyard. The Protestant clergy from
the start were highly suspicious of the Catholic king's new venture and probably wondered if there was more to it than met
the eye. Certainly they became increasingly disgruntled at what they considered the inappropriateness of having a factory
in the building adjacent to them.

Despite all these complications, somehow Böttger managed to start production in limited quantities. The red stoneware that
he had invented was far simpler to make and more stable in firing than white porcelain and in these early days he relied on
it to provide extra cash to make up the shortfall from the king and finance further experiments into white porcelain, which
still needed perfecting.

Although the red stoneware could be reliably made and fired, its incredible hardness and striking color meant that the usual
ceramic shapes and methods of decoration were by and large useless. The material was too fine, too hard and too completely
different to be treated like a normal ceramic. So new shapes had to be found to show it to advantage, new techniques developed
to decorate it, and above all new craftsmen employed who were capable of such innovative tasks. The potters at the faience
factory helped, but they were not skilled enough for what Böttger had in mind.

The substance was immensely versatile, and from the outset Böttger ensured that it was used to make objects of beauty and
refinement. Under his direction craftsmen developed a novel range of decorative techniques. They mixed red clay of slightly
differing compositions together to create the streaky, marbled effect of natural stone; they embellished surfaces with leaves
and blossoms in the style of Chinese porcelain and further adorned it with painting or even studding the surface with gems.
Correctly fired, the stoneware was nonporous and therefore did not need glazing; instead it could be treated like marble and
simply polished to a fine sheen. Added richness could be achieved by polishing certain areas while leaving others dull, thus
creating a striking contrast between matte and gleaming surfaces within a single object.

But the success of this multiplicity of decorative techniques relied on the skills of a wealth of specialist craftsmen, and
such people had to be found, tested, employed and given further training and direction. Freelance sculptors were hired to
model the fine details that were applied to the surface after a pot was thrown. Craftsmen in Bohemia, famed for their lapidary
and glass-engraving skills, finished the red porcelain by cutting, engraving and polishing until it resembled finely burnished
marble. Much of this work was done at a new polishing works set up outside Dresden on the Weisseritz, a tributary of the Elbe,
and Böttger's research led to the development of new grinding mills, which were also used to work agate and other semiprecious
stones.

Still Böttger remained unsatisfied, seeking more innovation and ever more visually appealing shapes. But, as a technician
rather than an artist, he needed help to realize the inspirational designs he envisaged. A turning point in the design of
stoneware came in 1711 when Böttger met the court silversmith Jacob Irminger. Impressed by the silversmith's work, Böttger
showed enormous trust by exceptionally permitting him to make a tour of the Meissen factory—and allowing him to take away
for trial modeling quantities of the best clay available.

Irminger was such a success that the king, with Böttger's approval, quickly appointed him artistic director, with instructions
to develop a range of items that would appeal to the luxury market, to the less affluent middle-market buyer and to a foreign
clientele. Like Böttger, Irminger remained based in Dresden, where from his studio he dreamed up new forms for the factory
to manufacture, fashioning them from copper before dispatching them to Meissen or to the Dresden factory to be cast in clay.
Every few months, far more regularly than Böttger, he made a trip to the Meissen factory and spent several days at a stretch
there, keeping an eye on production and teaching new staff how to achieve the effects he wanted.

As the workers at the factory became increasingly adept, Böttger strove to offer an ever larger repertoire of objects. By
1712 he had perfected several larger forms and, typically overoptimistic, announced to Steinbrück, the factory's supervisor,
that he would now be able to produce “stoves, fireplaces, cabinets, table tops, columns and pillars, door-posts, small coffins,
antique urns, slabs for covering floors, jewel boxes, chimes, pastry boxes and chess sets.” In short, Böttger was saying (as
usual not entirely truthfully) that almost anything could be made from his remarkable invention.

By far the most numerous and successful of all the objects made from Böttger's revolutionary red stoneware were vessels for
the three drinks that had been introduced to Europe in the seventeenth century and become entrenched in the social habits
of fashionable society: coffee, chocolate and tea.

In the absence of proper sanitation, water posed a huge health risk to those who dared drink it in its unadulterated state.
Boiling made it safer (although the existence of bacteria had yet to be discovered), but there was a great need for something
to be added that would disguise its tainted taste. Tea, coffee and chocolate not only had flavor, they also contained a mild
stimulant: those who sipped these drinks received a gentle boost, with none of the less dignified side effects of alcohol.

Coffee had been introduced from Arab countries, where it was enjoyed from the fourteenth century. Cocoa had been discovered
by the Spanish in Mexico following its conquest by Cortés. Tea, like porcelain, originated from China, where it had been a
favorite drink for centuries. The drink, known in Cantonese as
cha,
had been discovered in Canton by the Portuguese traders who were already importing it from China to Lisbon in 1580. In 1613
Samuel Purchas, on a visit to China, noted how in greeting a friend the locals “offer him Chia to drinke, which is the water
of a certain herbe of great price, and may not be omitted with other junkets.” A century later tea, like so many other Oriental
products, had become fashionable throughout Europe.

By Böttger's day, although these drinks had become one of the established conventions of polite society, the question of how
they were to be served had yet to be satisfactorily answered. One of the very earliest examples of a complete service for
tea and coffee was made between 1697 and 1701 by Augustus's imaginative court jeweler, Dinglinger, to celebrate the king's
accession to the Polish throne. Presented on a massive layered pyramid stand of gold, with a diminutive teapot perched at
the apex like some holy relic, the service is decked with sumptuous golden sugar bowls, exquisitely carved ivory figurines
and delicately engraved crystal vases, the whole studded with thousands of diamonds and precious gems. But perhaps the most
remarkable thing about this extraordinary and priceless object is that the cups are made from solid gold enameled in imitation
of Oriental porcelain. For despite his apparently limitless resources—quantities of gold and gems, amazing skills and brilliant
craftsmen—the unavoidable truth was that Dinglinger, like every other royal craftsman in the land, was unable to provide his
king with a genuine Saxon-made porcelain cup for his tea.

Clearly such an extravagance was never intended to be used for anything other than a ceremonial showpiece. Indeed, had it
been made for regular use Dinglinger's dilemma would have been even more awkward. To drink tea and coffee hot you needed a
material that would be strong enough to withstand the heat of boiling water but would also provide insulation so that the
person who was drinking it could sip the liquid while it was hot without burning themselves. Silver was all very well for
coffee, tea and chocolate pots but as a conductor of heat was clearly unsuited to use for cups, and the same could be said
of any other metal.

Ceramics were clearly ideal for such a function, for clay is an insulator rather than a conductor of heat. So the prolific
potters of Delft began making pots and cups in response to the snowballing fashion for these beverages. But here too there
were drawbacks. The porous nature of the earthenware body meant that if there were the slightest chip—and lead glaze is extremely
easily chipped—the body would not be watertight.

In the Far East tea was brewed in a kettle and served cooled in small handleless porcelain cups. Purchas noted how tea was
brewed in the Orient and wrote in 1613 “they put as much as a Walnut-shell may containe, into a dish of Porcelane, and drinke
it with hot water.” Noting that the unenlightened Europeans preferred to serve their exotic product from a pot, the Chinese
saw the potential for yet another lucrative Western market, and began making pots for export from their own Yixing red stoneware,
probably based on shapes copied from silver or delftware pots made in Europe.

When China's copies of European forms were seen by Böttger, he borrowed them back, realizing that his material was even finer
than Chinese stoneware and equally well able to withstand the rigors of boiling water. Thus the circle of fashion revolved
in a curious cross-pollination of ideas and customs: a design from Europe was transported to China and then welcomed back
to Europe again.