Skip to main content
A Marcolini Meissen blue-ground cup and saucer depicting Count and Countess Marcolini, circa 1790 image 1
A Marcolini Meissen blue-ground cup and saucer depicting Count and Countess Marcolini, circa 1790 image 2
Lot 123*

A Marcolini Meissen blue-ground cup and saucer depicting Count and Countess Marcolini, circa 1790

3 July 2025, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £1,280 inc. premium

Own a similar item?

Submit your item online for a free auction estimate.

How to sell

Looking for a similar item?

Our European Ceramics specialists can help you find a similar item at an auction or via a private sale.

Find your local specialist

Ask about this lot

A Marcolini Meissen blue-ground cup and saucer depicting Count and Countess Marcolini, circa 1790

The cup finely painted with oval profile portraits of Count Camillo Marcolini and his wife, Maria Anna Baroness O'Kelly, each within a frame tied with trailing flowers in two tones of gilding, the saucer reserved with a similar gilt frame painted with two classical figures at a pyre inscribed 'L'Amitié/ nous unit', formal gilt borders to rims and handle, the saucer: 13.3cm diam.; the cup: 6cm high, crossed swords mark, asterisk and 4 in underglaze-blue (saucer cleanly restuck and slightly worn) (2)

Footnotes

Provenance:
Anon., sale Christie's, 7th May 1973, lot 163 (part);
Anon., sale Christie's Geneva, 13th November 1989, lot 128;
Private collection, Germany, sold Christie's London, 31 March 2008, lot 322;
The Twinight Collection

Exhibited:
Paris, Musée national de céramique à Sèvres, Chefs d'oeuvres céramiques de collections privées allemandes, 30 June-20 July 1996

A part of the service was acquired in 1973 by Dr. Ernst Schneider, who, in addition to his own collection in Schloss Lustheim, gave cups to the Rijksmuseum, the Museo Internationale della Ceramiche in Faenza, and the Bavarian National Museum in Munich. The Meissen painters' work reports for 1790 mention several painters working on a service - possibly the same service - decorated with portraits of Marcolini and his wife, Maria Anna Baroness O'Kelly, whom he married in May 1778 (see A.L. Den Blaauwen, Meissen Porcelain in the Rijksmuseum, 1999, no. 264).

Additional information

Bid now on these items