Samuel Stöltzel

Samuel Stöltzel (born March 12, 1685 in Scharfenberg ; † August 13, 1737 in Meißen ) was an arcanist and chief master of the Meissen porcelain manufactory .

biography

Stöltzel was the son of a miner in Scharfenberg. He was first a miner in Scharfenberg and later in Freiberg . On January 19, 1706, he arrived at Albrechtsburg near Böttger as one of six committed miners from Freiberg . He became an arcanist and worked as a slumber, burner and later as a mass preparer. Because he had made a woman pregnant, Stöltzel fled to Vienna two months before Böttger's death on January 5, 1719 .

He had been lured there by the Austrian diplomat Count Virmont . He was promised an annual salary of 1000 guilders, free accommodation and equipage . In Vienna, Stöltzel was responsible for the porcelain mass and the procurement of the "Schnorrschen earth" ( kaolin ) at the Du Paquiers manufactory (the Viennese porcelain manufactory ) , which was how porcelain production was started there.

With a decree of March 11, 1720, Stöltzel was pardoned in Dresden. On April 7, 1720, he fled Vienna, although he had committed himself for 10 years. At the same time he brought porcelain paints and color formulas from Vienna. Before he fled, he destroyed the Viennese kilns and made the existing porcelain mass unusable, resulting in damage of around 15,000 thalers.

When he arrived in Saxony, he offered to make “... the porcelain ... at Meissen in all sorts of colors, and like the Indian, as I did in Vienna”. From July 1, 1720, Stöltzel was again active in the Albrechtsburg, but all by himself "in a remote vault". He shared the recipes for the brown glaze he had invented and for the glaze that went with the underglaze blue color. Since 1719, Stöltzel has been developing onglaze colors . Around 1720 he was involved in the development of blue painting. The development of the color palette and the gold paint in Meißen can be traced back to Stöltzel and Höroldt . In April 1723, Stöltzel became head master in the technical operations of the manufactory in Meißen. As a furnace specialist, he built the first muffle furnaces . Together with Johann Georg Schubert, he discovered the “Siebenlehner Stone”, which made it possible to manufacture feldspar instead of lime porcelain.

literature

• Otto Walcha : Meissen porcelain. From the beginning to the present . Verlag der Kunst, Dresden 1986, 8th edition, ISBN 3-364-00012-3 .
• Rainer Rückert : Biographical data of the Meißen manufacturers of the 18th century . Bavarian National Museum, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-925058-13-3 .