ROCAILLE: 250 YEARS OF ELEGANCE ON MAGNIFICENT TABLES
Magnificent, more magnificent, ROCAILLE. When you look at the service from 1767, lavish celebrations, lavishly laid tables and the exuberant imagination of the Rococo appear in your mind's eye. We'll show you why KPM's most extensive and colorful dinner service reflects the character of an entire era.
The name says it all, because the plates, boxes, bowls and jugs are decorated with shell-shaped ornaments , so-called “rocailles”. They are characteristic of the exquisite and valuable objects that the model master Friedrich Elias Meyer designed - although still under the name “Antique Zierat”. 90 years after it was created, it was King Friedrich Wilhelm IV who personally took charge of the service and gave it its current name.
But back to the origins. Friedrich Elias Meyer designed ROCAILLE for Frederick II, who named the newly acquired province of Breslau his third residential city after Berlin and Potsdam. The castle there still lacked adequate furnishings and so the first service “Decor Breslau City Palace” included 36 place settings, plates, bowls, tureens, etc. “...with gilded antique ornaments and blue mosaics, painted with natural, colorful flowers and garlands ...,” as noted in the order books of the time.
A painterly revolution
What was special about it wasn't just the new nuance of the porcelain, because the brilliant white was thanks to new raw material deposits. The color-intensive painting with its many nuances was also of a unique quality: variegated parrot tulips and carnations, irises, anemones and ranunculus with interspersed grasses, sometimes surrounded by butterflies, meant a painterly revolution. It is not for nothing that ROCAILLE is considered to be the most beautiful Rococo porcelain ever. At Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, the tables are still set with this service at state receptions for up to 70 people.
After all, socializing around lavishly laid tables is something that never goes out of style. Especially in recent years there has been a renewed interest in a certain table culture . The ROCAILLE, which is over 250 years old, is a reference to times past - but it carries an extremely modern idea.
