The Arcanum (20 page)

Realizing that the only way to break free from Herold's tyranny was to leave Saxony, he managed somehow to escape. He fled,
as the fugitive Böttger had done before him, toward Prague. Like the unfortunate alchemist, however, he too was quickly recaptured
by Augustus's soldiers. But here the parallel ends, for his recapture seems not to have deterred Heintze from repeating the
attempt, this time successfully. He went east to Breslau in Silesia, then south to Vienna and finally to Berlin. All these
cities boasted ceramic-making centers and in each he almost certainly offered his redoubtable services with a sense of profound
relief that he had finally broken free of Herold's regime.

Heintze left behind him a legacy of porcelain arrayed with Arcadian landscapes and harbor scenes in which his favorite motif—an
obelisk—provides as reliable a sign of authorship as the signature or initials so expressly forbidden by Herold. The only
piece actually signed by the unfortunate Heintze is a plate now in the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart, painted, ironically, with
a view of the Albrechtsburg, in which he was unhappily employed for so many years.

Heintze's crime of illicit home decoration was by no means unique. Numerous workers were spurred to engage in illegal private
work in order to survive. Even Herold's house, when searched in 1731 after a tip-off to the authorities by his resentful housekeeper,
was found to contain quantities of white porcelain that he too was presumably decorating on the side, in his case not out
of necessity, but greed. But Herold's position made him invulnerable. Despite their misgivings, the authorities could do little
but turn a blind eye to his misdemeanors. In this instance Herold was found to be slandered while the unfortunate informant
was publicly derided for her untruthfulness and thrown into prison.

Not all those exploited by Herold successfully ran away. Some members of his staff, perhaps not realizing the value of their
skills to rival establishments, put up with almost incredible ill treatment rather than run the risk of losing their employment.
Herold's despotic leadership is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in his dealings with Christian Friedrich Herold, a distant
relation who came to work for him in 1724.

Christian Friedrich had trained in the art of enameling on copper in Berlin and, until his arrival in Meissen, had never decorated
porcelain. But he quickly adapted his skills, becoming particularly engrossed with experiments into gilding. Noting his rapid
progress, Herold became worried that his talented kinsman might get ideas above his station. To keep him in check he refused
to pay him a regular salary, while at the same time forbidding him to conduct any private experiments into enameling, or to
take on any other private work.

But Christian Friedrich was genuinely enthralled by his research and, ignoring Herold's constraints, he continued discreetly
to work at home, painting copper panels for snuff boxes and experimenting diligently with new colors. When Herold heard rumors
of this waywardness he ordered the Meissen guards to search Christian Friedrich's cramped lodgings in the town's market square.
Enamels he had made at his own cost were impounded, the ingredients confiscated, and he, like Heintze, was arrested and tried
for illegal decorating for his own profit.

Christian Friedrich however had a stronger defense. He justified his actions by pointing out that the ingredients the soldiers
had found were for enameling on copper, not porcelain, and as such they provided no competition for a porcelain factory. Unusually,
in this instance, Herold's objections were overruled and the court found in Christian Friedrich's favor. But Herold never
forgave his cousin for what he considered to be his subversive actions and exacted a lengthy revenge by continually taking
advantage of him, working him unrelentingly and paying him poorly. Christian Friedrich was far from happy and made more than
one attempt to leave, but somehow Herold always found out and put a stop to it.

The final injustice came four decades later, when Christian Friedrich politely requested a modest pay raise in recognition
of his lengthy service. This quite reasonable demand Herold deemed to be a heinous crime tantamount to mutinous treachery,
which should be dealt with by the courts. Incredibly, this time Herold won; Christian Friedrich was convicted of subversion
and punished by four months' imprisonment, although even this mistreatment did not deter him from remaining at Meissen until
he retired.

Already trained before he came to Meissen, Christian Friedrich's repertoire was more varied than that of many of his contemporaries.
He was a master of action-packed battle scenes, serene landscapes, bustling harborside views and sensitive figure studies,
as well as the chinoiseries that Herold still continued to favor long after public taste had moved on to newer, fresher subjects.
He died aged seventy-nine in 1779, an unsung master to the end, little dreaming that in centuries to come his underappreciated
skills would be regarded as epitomizing Meissen's painterly decoration at its best.

As Meissen's reputation grew, and Herold's mistreated workforce expanded, so too did Meissen's profits. In 1724 the factory
had a staff of around forty workers while Herold had at his disposal twelve assistants. By the start of the next decade Herold's
business and Meissen's turnover had escalated more than fourfold and there were over ninety workers in the factory's employ.

Augustus was now reaping the rewards of his gold-making fantasy. Gold poured into his coffers and, equally important as far
as the porcelain-hungry king was concerned, porcelain of spectacular quality and magnificence—outshining that of the Orient—now
flooded in to fill his palaces. Between the years of 1717 and 1732 Augustus received a total of 27,000 thalers profit in gold
and a staggering 880,000 thalers worth of porcelain.

Hand in hand with the king's blossoming collection, Herold's enterprise prospered spectacularly too. He was still employed
as an independent artist on highly favorable terms, but the cost of his lodgings, his fuel, his horses and even his candles
was met by Meissen. His income was now vast—around 4,000 thalers, an enormous sum considering that his best-paid employee
was paid only a little over 300 thalers and most workers were lucky to receive half that sum. But perhaps the most surprising
aspect of Herold's canniness was that no one on the commission fully appreciated the colossal sums he was raking in. His profiteering
only came to light in the most unexpected way—as a result of an outrageous deception.

Another of the Cabinet Ministers, who was also formerly Prime Minister to the late King of Poland, was the Count de Hoyhm.…
I knew him intimately before he was advanced to the Ministry, at Paris and at Vienna, as well as here at Dresden.…
There is not a Minister at this Court more civil, more learned, or a better friend to learned Men. During his long Residence
at Paris as Ambassador from the King of Poland, his House was open to all Men of Learning as it is now at Dresden; and he
had the splendid Title given him of the Maecenas of Saxony.

B
ARON
C
ARL
L
UDWIG VON
P
OELLNITZ,
Memoirs,
1737

T
he scandal rocked both factory and court to its foundations. One of Augustus's most trusted ministers had been implicated
in a web of disgraceful chicanery. His duplicity involved industrial and political espionage and he had come closer to endangering
the security of the arcanum than anyone since Stölzel when he had fled to Vienna a decade earlier.

In the lax Dresden court, corruption, profiteering and unscrupulous dealing were endemic at virtually every level. It was
almost expected that those in positions of power and privilege should profit from their status by whatever means was available.
But the Lemaire de Hoyhm affair, as it became known, was different; it was a scandal of such monumental proportions that even
the king could not sanction or ignore it.

In 1729 Augustus, still frequently called to attend to affairs of state in Poland, had appointed his prime minister, Count
de Hoyhm, as senior director of the Meissen manufactory to represent his interests there. A member of one of the most powerful
Saxon families, de Hoyhm was the brother of the unfortunate courtier whose wife had become Augustus's most infamous mistress,
the Countess of Cozelle. As Saxon ambassador at the courts of Vienna and Paris he had become accustomed to a life of privilege—and
loved nothing better than embroiling himself in the intrigues of court life.

During his tour of diplomatic duty at Versailles, de Hoyhm acquired an indispensable coterie of French acquaintances, among
them one Rudolph Lemaire, an entrepreneur with a keen eye for business opportunities, no matter how dubious. Soon after de
Hoyhm returned to Saxony and took up residence in “the most considerable building in Dresden.” Lemaire, hearing that his Saxon
acquaintance was now in charge of Europe's most illustrious ceramics manufactory, arrived in Dresden and came to call on him.
Together they hatched various schemes to make themselves rich beyond compare—all at the expense of the Meissen factory.

At de Hoyhm's instigation Augustus was prevailed upon to allow Lemaire exclusive rights to sell Meissen porcelain in both
France and Holland. The wary king was persuaded that Lemaire was ideally placed, with his contacts in the French court and
elsewhere, to develop Meissen's international market. Such an eminent representative would, promised de Hoyhm, bring Meissen
greater recognition, which in turn would bring incalculable prestige to the royal owner of the factory.

Because Lemaire was familiar with the latest French fashions it was decided that he would be permitted to commission Meissen
to make pieces to special order that would appeal to the refined Parisian taste. Among the chic clientele frequenting the
shops in the boulevards of Paris, Lemaire had noticed that the appetite for Oriental porcelain, in particular kakiemon, was
as yet unsatisfied. Kakiemon porcelain, Lemaire also realized, was far more costly even than Meissen.

De Hoyhm therefore arranged that the factory should supply Lemaire with large consignments of porcelain that directly copied
kakiemon. With unbelievable audacity the pair decided that designs and shapes were to be meticulously duplicated from choice
pieces in the king's own collection. To this end, more than 120 precious items from Augustus's prized displays at the Dutch
Palace were carefully packed and transported the twelve miles along the perilously rutted roads to Meissen, there to be copied
in large numbers. The payments received by the factory for these huge orders, confidentially agreed between the two conspirators,
were little more than token sums, far below the usual market price for such intricate wares. Thus Meissen was rapidly being
bled by the very agent whom everyone believed to be nurturing its interests.

The fraud might have gone unnoticed except that Lemaire induced de Hoyhm to order that the by now usual crossed swords mark
of Meissen be left off. Facsimile Oriental marks would, he said, be acceptable; failing that, the porcelain should be left
unmarked.

Almost immediately questions were asked about the wisdom of selling unmarked wares that so exactly imitated Oriental porcelain.
Even if Lemaire were selling them honestly as Meissen copies, fraud could easily be perpetrated later on by other unscrupulous
dealers and Meissen's reputation might be called into question. For his part Augustus was furious, not because of moral scruples,
but because the lack of a Meissen mark meant that he would receive no recognition for the accomplishment of the designs.

Nevertheless, through a mixture of coercion and bribery, de Hoyhm managed to slip quantities of unmarked pieces out of the
factory. Others were marked in blue on top of the glaze in such a way that the mark would easily be scratched off. It is a
testimony to the extraordinary skill of the Meissen decorators that even to the discerning eyes of today's collectors some
of the unmarked pieces made at this time are virtually indistinguishable from the Japanese originals.

In the meantime, not content simply to earn a fortune from the sale of counterfeit Japanese porcelain, de Hoyhm and Lemaire
began to cast their net of chicanery still wider, dreaming up an even more damaging plot: to discover and sell to France the
precious arcanum for porcelain itself.

Louis XV, like every other luxury-loving European monarch, had acquired a dangerous fondness for porcelain. Ever since he
had heard that Augustus had founded a factory making true porcelain he too yearned to join the race and sponsor a similar
royal enterprise—one that would eclipse that of Saxony. Later in the decade he would invest in the Vincennes factory, a soft
paste porcelain factory founded in 1738 and reborn in 1756 as the royal Sèvres manufactory, which like Meissen survives to
this day. But in 1730, there was no royal manufactory, and French factories such as those at St. Cloud and Chantilly had still
only managed to make
pâte tendre
or soft porcelain. Louis, the treacherous Lemaire knew, would be frantic to get ahold of the arcanum—at almost any price.