Bisque Porcelain Scroll-Form Bud Vase with Blue Jasper Cameo of a Dancing Maiden in a Gilt Rococo Cartouche, Attributed to Schafer & Vater, Germany, c. 1895–1915

The Piece

A small three-sided bud vase in unglazed bisque porcelain, modelled as a sheet of paper caught part-way through unrolling.

The walls curve into a soft triangle and the top edge sweeps up at one corner, so the vase reads as a scroll standing on end rather than as a cylinder. At that raised corner and again at the foot sit applied clusters of relief flowers, moulded separately and pressed on, in the body colour throughout.

The body is matte, dry and faintly chalky, a pale greyish cream, with no glaze anywhere on the outside. The interior is glazed.

The front carries an applied panel of cornflower blue bearing a white relief figure: a woman mid-dance, arms lifted, drapery falling away from one hip and a long scarf streaming above her head.

Around it runs a heavy gilt rococo cartouche — asymmetric C-scrolls, acanthus, and a large gilt daisy standing proud at each side.

The base is flat and triangular, impressed 2962 with a small 12, and carries three small blue painted dots in a row. There is no factory mark.

History & Provenance

The blue panel is an imitation of Wedgwood jasperware, and it was never meant to be taken for one. White relief figures on a coloured matte ground were Josiah Wedgwood's invention, and by the end of the nineteenth century they were the most widely copied effect in European ceramics. The fancy-goods factories of Thuringia built a trade on supplying that look at a price an ordinary household could pay — the shape, the colour and the cameo, without the name.

Schafer & Vater was founded in 1890 by Gustav Schaefer and Gunther Vater at Volkstedt-Rudolstadt in Thuringia, Germany, and in 1896 bought a second works, the List Porcelain Manufactory at Neuhaus. Their business was small bisque porcelain: figural bottles, creamers, match strikers, hatpin holders, planters and bud vases, alongside a jasperware-imitation line in blue, green and pink.

A fire destroyed the factory in 1918 and it was rebuilt. Production fell away through the 1950s and the firm ceased trading in 1962.

Then the record itself was destroyed. In 1973 the East German government took over the empty factory and destroyed the company's records and its moulds. That is the reason an impressed number like the 2962 on this base cannot simply be looked up: the ledger it referred to no longer exists, and neither does the mould. What survives of the firm's output survives as objects, not as documentation.

The firm marked much of its work and not all of it. Marked pieces carry a crown above an R set in a star, frequently with a “Made in Germany” label. A substantial part went out unmarked, or carrying nothing but impressed mould numbers. This piece is of the second kind.

The attribution rests on the object and is offered as an attribution, not as a marked identification. Unglazed bisque porcelain body; an applied jasper-imitation panel in blue with a white relief figure; a hand-gilt rococo cartouche; applied relief florets in the body colour; a small bud-vase format; and impressed mould and size numbers with no printed factory mark.

The figure is Art Nouveau, not classical, whatever the jasper dress suggests. A true Wedgwood jasper figure stands still, in classical drapery, composed in profile or three-quarter view. This one is caught in movement — weight off one foot, both arms up, a scarf lifted and floating behind her. That is the dancing maiden of the 1890s and 1900s, the same figure that runs through the posters, lamps and bronzes of the period, and it does not appear before the Art Nouveau decades.

The gold was laid on by hand, and it has worn like it. It is thin across the crests of the scrolls and the tops of the daisies, where a small object gets picked up and put down, and full and bright down in the recesses where nothing touches it.

The three blue dots on the base are a decorator's tally — a paint-shop mark recording whose hand or which batch, never intended to be read by a buyer.

Dated c. 1895–1915 on the firm's 1890 founding, the Art Nouveau dancing figure, the bisque-and-applied-jasper formula of the pre-war German fancy-goods export trade, and the impressed-only marking. No country-of-origin mark survives on the piece; German export novelties of this kind commonly carried an applied paper label, which is the first thing to be lost.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A bud vase is the smallest piece of furniture in a house, and the one most likely to get used every week.

It takes one stem, or two. A single rose, a sprig of lavender, a bit of rosemary off the windowsill, one branch of something flowering in March. That is a far lower bar than a proper arrangement, which is exactly why small vases earn their shelf space and large ones spend most of the year empty.

The interior is glazed, so it holds water properly rather than weeping through the way unglazed ware does.

What makes this one worth looking at is the contrast built into it. Bisque absorbs light. Unglazed porcelain is matte and dry and slightly chalky, and next to anything shiny it reads as stone or plaster rather than china. Against that dead-flat cream, the only two things in the whole object that catch light are the blue cameo and the gold around it — which is precisely the effect the maker was after, and it still works.

The scale puts it where larger pieces cannot go: a bathroom shelf, a bedside table, a narrow windowsill, the corner of a desk, in front of the books on a shelf. The three-sided form means it also sits into a corner in a way a round vase never quite does.

Empty it is a small sculpture, and it holds pens, brushes or a pair of scissors perfectly well.

A note on care, and unglazed bisque has one rule that matters more than any other. It is porous, and it does not give anything back. Dirt, oil, tea, ink and soap all go into the surface and stay there, and no amount of later cleaning brings them out. Keep it away from anything that stains and handle it with clean dry hands.

Never soak it, and never wash it with soap or solvent. Dust it with a soft dry brush — a clean makeup brush or a soft toothbrush gets down into the relief flowers and the cartouche where a cloth cannot. If it needs more than that, a barely damp cotton swab on the glazed interior only.

Do not scrub the gilding, which is over-glaze and will come off under an abrasive, and keep the piece out of a dishwasher and a microwave entirely.

For fresh flowers, stand a slim glass vial inside. The interior glaze copes with water on its own, but a vial keeps splashes off the bisque at the rim, which is where marks show first.