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Peony blossoms and bamboo sprays bloom in rust and coral on Herend's Chinese Bouquet, said to date from the 1860s. In 1851, Queen Victoria ordered a set from Herend, the Hungarian house. Read its story.
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At the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, Queen Victoria ordered a Herend service in a butterfly and floral pattern, and the Hungarian house won international recognition. Chinese Bouquet gathers its blooms from further east. The story goes that Herend's painters drew on the Chinese export porcelain of the 18th century. They made that borrowed garden their own, softening each flower into a stylized, graceful form.
Every bloom is painted by hand beneath the glaze on hard-paste porcelain. The Rust colourway gathers the palette into glowing earth tones, warm against the white ground like a garden at dusk.
Rising from the lid, a sculptural twist finial crowns the tureen with a flourish of its own. A fishscale border rims the piece like fine lace and frames the blooms within. Gold accents trace the design, and they shimmer as the light moves across the porcelain.
Herend was born of patience. In 1826, in a quiet Hungarian town a short journey from Budapest, Vince Stingl opened a modest earthenware workshop with a craft he had learned in Vienna. Little by little, that workshop mastered porcelain, and with it a beauty fine enough to stop a queen.
And stop a queen it did. At London's Great Exhibition of 1851, Queen Victoria herself chose the house's gold medal-winning design for Windsor Castle, and Mor Fischer named it Victoria in her honor. Europe's great families followed. Herend named designs for the Esterházy, Batthyány, Rothschild and Apponyi houses who first bought them. Emperor Francis Joseph raised Fischer to the nobility in 1867, and the now legendary house became purveyor to the Habsburg dynasty.
That royal favor never left the house. By its own account, Herend is now the largest porcelain manufactory in the world. Yet its painters and gilders still finish their work by hand, for a house that belongs largely to the artisans who keep it. Its porcelain now graces homes in every corner of the world, prized most by collectors with a discerning eye. They know each piece carries the same craft that once won a queen's favor.
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