IN THE GREEN

The Augarten Porcelain Museum’s next special exhibition explores the imperial gardens in the vicinity of the imperial capital, Vienna, as venues for utility, experimentation and pleasure. From the early eighteenth century onwards, the influence of new discoveries in botany and fashions in garden design blended with an enthusiasm for the ‘artificial’ [artistic] imitation of nature and with the evolving refinements of table culture. As a material that could be modelled with the utmost precision and decorated in a naturalistic style, porcelain was ideally suited to realising these aims.

 The exhibition centres on the Augarten as an exemplary 18th-century imperial pleasure garden, which was opened in 1775 as a recreational park for ‘all people’. It exemplifies the contemporary longing for
nature and escape from the city, the interplay of politics and garden art, and summer days spent in ‘good health’ between the Baroque and the Enlightenment. To this end, the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory conjured up winter blooms and entire gardens to adorn the tables. The cosmos set amidst greenery, immortalised on and in porcelain, becomes a reflection of a society that sought to create its own paradises through science, privilege and poetry.

Augarten Palace, home to the Augarten Porcelain Manufactory since 1923, was built in 1705 on the orders of Emperor Joseph I as a summer residence for his mother, the Empress Dowager Eleonora Magdalena. An intimate French-style flower garden nestled against the palace in the Augarten, surrounded by woods, meadows and branches of the Danube. Half a century later, the Augarten became a place of solace for Joseph II, whilst greenhouses and kitchen gardens supplied the court kitchen with pineapples and peaches, as well as all manner of other gifts from nature.

The exhibition ‘Im Grünen’ (In the Green) highlights the significance of nature in court life during the eighteenth and early ninteenth centuries as reflected in porcelain, as well as the growing importance of green refuges as places of relaxation for the urban population, amongst many other aspects of Viennese porcelain as a medium for the love of nature.