Vaas of jachtfles van beschilderd porselein c. 1774 - 1784

Curator: Oh, how lovely. I feel a sense of calm just looking at it. Editor: I see a delicate porcelain vase from around 1774 to 1784. It's called "Vase or Hunting Bottle of Painted Porcelain," and was produced in the Loosdrecht factory, now residing in the Rijksmuseum. I suppose its pale simplicity really does evoke that sort of quiet refinement that the Rococo style often strove for. Curator: Refinement is an excellent word! It's the understated palette of browns against the white that does it for me. It feels almost like a memory of a flower garden, softened by time. The brown almost resembles the sepia tones of old photographs, conveying an aesthetic elegance. It's like finding beauty in muted simplicity. What strikes you beyond the style? Editor: Well, the fact that this bottle imitates, both in shape and design, objects meant for hunting rituals, points to the adoption of aristocratic leisure pursuits by the upwardly mobile bourgeois class in the Netherlands during this period. Porcelain itself, a costly material to produce, acted as an accessible signal of status. Curator: It's funny you mention its social status because I instantly imagined it displayed in a grand hallway, or upon a woman's vanity filled with perfumes or tonics. Tell me, are the flowers specifically chosen for some hidden symbolism, or do they purely provide aesthetic value? Editor: In many ways, the flowers signal prosperity through the appreciation of leisure and decorative arts. Porcelain art during this time provided a controlled landscape where the elite and the rising middle-class projected ideals of class mobility onto natural forms, thereby legitimizing the aesthetic value as an index of virtue and gentility. Curator: Oh, I can definitely feel that projected ideal. Maybe I am picking up on that historical desire for beauty through virtue! Editor: Indeed. Curator: I appreciate this Rococo vase even more now, it is far more subversive and representative of wealth and class elevation through the quiet signaling of bourgeois aesthetic preferences, far more than it may seem at first glance.