Riessner, Stellmacher & Kessel (“Amphora”)

Riessner, Stellmacher & Kessel began operations on September 1, 1892, in Turn (Trnovany), a manufacturing suburb of the spa town of Teplitz (Teplice) in northern Bohemia, then an Austrian crown land and today part of the Czech Republic. The founding was a family affair organized around Alfred Stellmacher, who had run a porcelain factory in Turn since about 1860 and whose artistic vision and experience stood behind the new enterprise without his name appearing in it. The partners were his son Eduard Stellmacher, newly graduated from the Kunstgewerbeschule in Dresden, who took charge of design, and three sons-in-law: Hans Riessner, formerly head of the workshops at the elder Stellmacher’s factory, as technical director; his brother Karl Riessner, who handled finances; and Rudolf Kessel, who handled trade. A fourth son-in-law, the modeler Paul Dachsel, designed many of the firm’s most remarkable vases of the 1890s. The company was entered in the commercial register at Leitmeritz (Litoměřice) on January 30, 1894. Its first works occupied a former water mill below the dam of the Königelteich pond on the Lindenstrasse, one of Turn’s main streets, with “Kunst-Keramik Riessner, Stellmacher und Kessel” lettered across the front; this was the plant later known as Amphora I, and it produced porcelain. The trade name came from the mark: a stylized amphora on a stand, encircled by TURN-TEPLITZ-BOHEMIA over the initials RStK and printed in red, which was joined in time by the impressed crown with AMPHORA and AUSTRIA in ovals and, from 1896, by the Austrian double eagle the firm was entitled to display as a supplier to the imperial court in Vienna.

Success came quickly. A selection from the first series won the Highest Award at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and a gold medal at San Francisco the following winter, and the interest of American buyers shaped the firm’s export strategy for a decade. In 1893 the partners bought the Josef F. Wagner porcelain factory, steam-powered and modern, which became Amphora II and was given over to terra cotta, a low-fired soft stoneware, in which a line of figurative sculpture was launched early in 1894. In 1895 they bought the former Gröschel & Spethmann works at Mariascheinerstrasse 330, which became Amphora III and concentrated on faience, decorated earthenware vases, jardinieres and flower pots, and hard-fired earthenware figures and vases with animals. The workforce grew from about one hundred in 1895 to 250 a year later and 300 by 1900, drawing on the Special Ceramics School in Teplitz, whose evening and Sunday classes trained many of the painters. Painted and figural ivory porcelain earned a diplôme d’honneur at Antwerp in 1894; the title of supplier to the imperial court followed in 1896. Sample warehouses and showrooms opened in Berlin, London, Vienna, Paris, Prague and Brussels, the Paris addresses on the rue de Paradis, the street of the ceramic and glass trade; the firm showed at every Leipzig fair from 1896 to 1904 and at the Winterausstellung of the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry in Vienna, and it collected a gold medal at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, a diplôme d’honneur at Turin in 1902 and the Grand Prix at St. Louis in 1904, among many other distinctions. In both quality and scale of production, Jan Mergl concludes, the firm had no competitor within Austria-Hungary around 1900, and it received an invitation to exhibit at the ceramics museum at Sèvres.

What distinguished Amphora from its neighbors in the Teplitz district was the combination, unusual in an industrial pottery, of artist-owners designing for their own works. In 1902 the trade journal Sprechsaal published an article advocating the artist as designer in the applied arts; it was, as Mergl observes, precisely the arrangement under which the firm had operated for a decade. Eduard Stellmacher led the design department, Dachsel created the original models, and the painters Hans Klier, senior painter and after 1900 an instructor at the Teplitz school, and Nikolaus Kannhäuser, head painter from 1897, directed the decoration. Historicism counted for little; the few neo-baroque and neo-rococo vases were a carryover from the elder Stellmacher’s lines. The 1890s belonged instead to Japanese-inspired painting — Klier’s motifs, Dachsel’s vessel shapes and relief decoration, and the early ivory-porcelain vases with cobalt poppies on a white ground that carry only the red RStK stamp — and, from about 1895, to Art Nouveau, first visible in Eduard Stellmacher’s graceful symbolic figures with their evident French influence. Between 1899 and 1902 most designs were tied to Stellmacher’s own vision, applied with particular force to vases with animal motifs and to a large group of floral Art Nouveau models, while Dachsel’s pieces of the same years show the drip glazes characteristic of the style. The Grès-Bijou line of 1904, with its jewel-like inlaid ornament, was the firm’s last great commercial innovation before a double loss: Dachsel left in 1903 to found his own works in Turn, and on August 10, 1904, Eduard Stellmacher withdrew from the company to establish one in which he could pursue his own ideas. On July 19, 1905, the firm was re-registered as Riessner & Kessel “Amphora”; soon afterward Rudolf Kessel absconded to the United States with embezzled funds, Karl Riessner died on May 3, 1910, and on September 7, 1910, Hans Riessner, now sole owner, registered the business as Amphora-Werke Riessner.

Hans Riessner took over artistic direction and compensated for the loss by turning to outside artists: teachers at the Teplitz school, among them Fritz Eichmann and Anton Heinzel; the Vienna sculptor Arthur Strasser, whose animal sculptures and large equestrian groups were edited in Amphora ceramics and whose Marcus Antonius Drawn by Lions was registered as a protected model in 1909; and Ernst Hegenbarth, Michael Mörtl and others whose neoclassical sculptures the firm issued from 1910 as “reproductions of modern sculptures.” The Campina series of 1909, designed by Max von Jungwirth of the Teplitz school, did well, and the firm continued to show at Liège in 1905, Milan in 1906, St. Petersburg in 1908 and Brussels in 1910, where the Grand Prix marked its last major international appearance. But the period from 1905 to 1910, in Mergl’s judgment, was commercially successful rather than creative, and interest in Art Nouveau ceramics was waning everywhere; the Berlin and Leipzig showrooms closed in December 1911, and the workforce fell to 150 by 1913. Hans Riessner, last of the founders, died in 1920 at fifty-seven. His children carried the firm through the stagnation of the 1920s, the near-bankruptcy that preceded Roland Riessner’s rescue of 1927, the technical and artistic direction of the chemist Rüdiger Riessner in the 1930s and the reduced wartime production of faience flower pots, porcelain figures and vases. Like other German-owned factories in the region, the company was nationalized by Czechoslovakia in 1945, merged in October 1946 into the United Ceramics Plants at Teplice-Šanov and closed in the late 1960s; the buildings of the once-famous Amphora works were demolished in the early 1970s.

Amphora’s animals belong above all to the Stellmacher years. A pencil sketch of about 1899 for a vase with frogs and plantain shows the designer thinking animal and plant together, and the firm’s own accounts of Amphora III single out hard-fired earthenware vases with animals as a specialty. Dragons, sea serpents, bats, octopuses, lizards and spiders climb, coil and spread across vessels, often forming their handles or crowning their rims; the fantastic and the zoological mix as freely as in Franz Metzner’s porcelain for KPM Berlin, but with a sculptural exuberance and an openness to gilding, jewel-like inlay and iridescent glaze that are Amphora’s own. The Bestiaire’s spider-web vase of about 1904–05, its molded spiders strung between leaves beneath a crown of jeweled poppies, stands at the junction of Stellmacher’s animal vision and Riessner’s Grès-Bijou. Set beside the French workshops, Amphora is their industrial counterpart rather than their imitator: where Carriès, Dalpayrat or Bigot prized the single fired accident and the individual hand, Amphora worked from numbered models in the thousands, molded and editioned in three factories; yet its ties to France were real — the showrooms on the rue de Paradis, the invitation to Sèvres, and the French symbolism that shaped Eduard Stellmacher’s figures. Its production therefore represents the Austro-Hungarian contribution to the ceramic bestiary: prolific, theatrical and unafraid of the monstrous.