11 The imperial family, members of the high nobility and high-ranking ministers ordered services, commissioned individual pieces of porcelain as gifts, and sometimes even had ensembles made to decorate entire rooms. Scions of the Princely House of Liechtenstein were among the major patrons and supporters of the porcelain works established in immediate proximity to their garden palace in the Rossau quarter. Like so many other cities, Vienna too was seized by the ‘maladie de porcelaine’: Prince Joseph Wenzel I von Liechtenstein, for example, possessed a collection of almost three hundred items displayed in a magnificent porcelain cabinet so admired by Maria Theresa that she promptly commissioned a room to equal it at Schönbrunn Palace. What makes the creations of Du Paquier so exceptional is their ability to capture the special charm of Vienna at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The capital of the empire was even then a relatively cosmopolitan city and thus a melting-pot of the ideas, talent, and visual and cultural experiences of the people who met here and exchanged views in a plethora of different languages. At the Du Paquier works, all this fed into the creation of compositions whose playfulness, originality and delight in surprising effects demonstrate how enjoyable it must have been to gain access to undreamt-of new possibilities with this new material and at the same time to be unshackled from rigid stylistic expectations. At the same time, there was an ambitious desire to make porcelain that would surpass the wares of East Asia, as emphasized in the ‘Privilege’ or charter granted by the emperor to set up the manufactory: ‘... all kinds of finest porcelain, majolica and Indian wares, and such things as are made in East India and other foreign lands, with far more beautiful colours and embellishments and shapes’.1 The wealth of ideas was vast, and the manufactory developed a language of forms that effortlessly blended a specifically Viennese aesthetic sensibility with exotic influences, often 1 The Imperial Privilege of 27 May 1718, OeStA Wien, FHKA, NHK Bancale Akten NÖ 620, 27 May 1718, fol. 1 r.
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