21 Facts and myths surrounding the earliest Meissen Blue Onion Pattern For several decades from the beginning of the 20th century, Meissen scholars were generally agreed that the Blue Onion Pattern originated in Meissen on the basis of a Chinese prototype from the royal collections in Dresden. In his standard work on Meissen porcelain published in 1900, Karl Berling, previously Director of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Dresden, mooted that the pattern had emerged in about 1745. He felt this to be proven by a Meissen plate privately owned in Dresden with “three differing types of fruit pointing inwards on its ledge” and by a possibly no longer extant plate decorated with a Chinese Blue Onion Pattern whose fruit he described as being “Japanese peaches” and “pomegranates” (figs. 1 and 2). He ascribed the blue-painter’s cipher “K” and hence authorship of the first Blue Onion Pattern to the experienced Meissen blue-painter Johann David Kretzschmar.1 Ernst Zimmermann, then Director of the Dresden Porcelain Collection, argued in 1926 that the Blue Onion Pattern must have been conceived in around 1739, since as of that year there was a drop in complaints about the cobalt blue, whose manufacture and application had been causing problems for years.2 It was a year that, for a long time thereafter, was regarded as having ushered in the Blue Onion Pattern. 1 Plate D. 10.24" (26 cm), decorated in underglaze blue, crossedswords mark in underglaze blue and blue-painter’s cipher “K”, Meissen, c. 1740, formerly privately owned in Dresden. Reproduced from: Berling 1900, p. 120.
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