Tôle Peinte Dish

An unusal and highly decorative toleware dish or basket of circular form with an ornate pierced rim with stylised leaf border and a vitruvian scroll motiv decorated against a dark green background. In the centre a finely polychrome painted landscape with some figures promenading.

Johann Heinrich Stobwasser (1740-1829)

was the founder of one of the most important japanning factories of the day. The main factory was in Brunswick, a subsidiary one was established in Berlin in 1772. They specialized in small objects, notably boxes very finely painted with portraits, landscapes, mythological scenes after Old Masters, sentimental genre scenes, etc. They soon became one of the most important japanning factories of the day with a broad aristrocratic clientele such as the Princely house of Weimar, the Prussian court or the daughter of the Tsar Maria Pavlovna (1787-1859), who bought many pieces for the castles in and around St. Petersburg. But even the upper middle class, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller or E.T.A. Hoffmann are among the clients of Stobwasser.