Schotel 1775

Curator: This delicate porcelain dish, titled "Schotel," hails from the Loosdrecht manufactory around 1775, currently residing here at the Rijksmuseum. The scene, painted in a vibrant monochrome purple, depicts two figures gazing towards a distant, mountainous landscape. Editor: It’s interesting. The circular composition, combined with the purple wash, gives a dreamy, almost melancholic feeling. Curator: Exactly. What's striking about Loosdrecht porcelain is their ability to emulate the aesthetic of painting on such an intimate scale. The manufacture of these porcelains would have been tied to the specific raw materials available to workshops in the Netherlands. This particular one would likely have been for the pleasure of looking at it, instead of actually being used. Editor: The purple—likely a manganese-based pigment—creates a kind of miniature world, heightened by the simplicity of form and shape. Look at the details on those fir trees, and how the artist evokes distance and atmospheric perspective with such limited chromatic tools! Curator: What interests me, from a materialist perspective, is how the production of luxury ceramics became a marker of national identity in the 18th century. These were part of larger tableware sets that signaled wealth, good taste, and leisure, also involving the mine workers needed to dig up all these materials. Editor: You’re right, it functions as a status object. Yet, divorced from that context, the plate allows the composition, that interplay of horizontal ground and rising mountain, to truly come forward. Curator: And isn’t it compelling to consider how even seemingly innocent landscapes like this can encode complex power relations? The raw materials, the labour involved, and the final display all speak to that history. Editor: Perhaps. But when I gaze at it, I am primarily captivated by that carefully calibrated asymmetry and balance achieved through its design! Curator: It makes you reflect on our aesthetic judgments themselves. Editor: Indeed, but either way, it’s really interesting when viewing a dish!