Sentimental Porcelain. Meissen Porcelain and Enlightenment Sensibility in Late Eighteenth-Century Saxony

Abstract

Meissen porcelain objects representing sentimental subjects – such as scenes of familial and romantic love, and the joys of childhood – are documents of fundamental importance for understanding the penetration of Enlightenment ideas into late eighteenth-century Saxony. They speak to the reception of key Enlightenment literary works in social contexts characterised by a new elite made up of wealthy members of the bourgeoisie and liberal aristocrats united in their embrace of progressive ideas about the relationship between reason and sentiment. Embedded as they were in very specific social practices – the sociable rituals of hot beverage consumption, and cultures of viewing and conversation in the domestic interior – these porcelain objects are primary evidence for identifying and reconstructing emotional communities founded on a shared embrace of Enlightenment sensibility amongst the upper echelons of Saxon society in the last decades of the eighteenth century.