Antique Schumann Bavaria Dresdener Art Coffee Service Set – Three Pieces, Chocolate Pot And Creamer, Saxon Flower, Hand Gilt, Germany 1920s

A three-piece Schumann Bavaria service in the German Saxon-flower tradition, sold together as the set. A coffee pot of about 8.5 inches with a long gooseneck spout, a taller pot at 9.5 inches, and a creamer at 6 inches with a triangular three-way lip. Each carries a polychrome bouquet across the body and a gold cartouche band around the neck.

Two layers, and they were not made the same way. The bouquets are transfer-printed — the Dresden-style print Schumann used throughout the Dresdener Art line, which put a Saxon-flower composition on a body without the cost of painting each one by hand. Pink cabbage rose at the heart, red and yellow garden flowers around it, blue forget-me-nots above, sage foliage threading between.

The gold is the other half. Hold a piece under angled light: the cartouche scrolls sit at several depths, thickening at the centre of each curl, and the line along the spout carries the same swelling where a hand slowed. That gilt was etched, laid and burnished at the bench.

The nineteen-twenties to the forties. The creamer base carries the green shield-and-crown mark in full — Bavaria above, Schumann centred, Dresdener Art along the lower line — with a hand-inked blue batch number, 83. That four-part format belongs to the 1918 to 1940 window, the strongest stretch of the Dresdener Art line; the reorganisation after the war simplified the mark and dropped the shield.

Carl Schumann's works at Arzberg in Bavaria, running from 1881 until 1996. Dresdener Art was the firm's open tribute to the Dresden decorators of the century before — Wolfsohn, Thieme, Lamm — who built the Saxon-flower style in Saxony. Not Dresden, and never claimed to be. Set all three on a sideboard and the gold takes whatever light is in the room.