Limited Edition Shell-shaped Dish Nautilus

Andreas Herten thrives on making imaginative play with shapes from nature. Captivated by the beauty and formal diversity of sea snails and sea-shells, he incorporates the little ocean dwellers as aesthetic devices in a great many of his schemes. Here he has been inspired to immortalise maritime splendours on a shell dish modelled by Konrad Hentschel in 1902.

Form and decoration are suffused into a single artistic entity in the present shell dish. The dish's shape is carried over into the finely painted detail that adorns its surface. Mr Herten's naturalistic style of painting most marvellously brings out the natural profusion of colour in the underwater world as exemplified by a motley selection of shells, sea snails and starfish. Common to them all are pieces of coral intricately pencilled in in gilt that lend the scheme a certain quality of abstraction on account of their shape. The upshot is a richly detailed specimen of finest Meissen art-handicraft that brings us closer to enchanting aspects of the aquatic world that are often concealed from us otherwise.