With its elaborate platinum frieze and faux tortoise-shell ground, the present vase is a masterwork of late 19th century Meissen. The subject comes from Ernst Julius Hähnel’s (1811-1891) procession of Bacchus, a sandstone bas relief designed for the Dresden Court Theater circa 1840. The relief itself was destroyed in a fire in 1869, but photographs exist in a work published by the Gilbers’sche Hofbuchhandlung, Dresden in 1888, along the rest of Hähnel’s complete oeuvre. Hähnel’s original drawings for the frieze, which vary somewhat from the finished relief, are illustrated in E. Kashey, Fifty German nineteenth century drawings and watercolors, fall exhibition, 1983, Shepherd Gallery, New York, no. 26, include several figure groups that directly correlate to those on the present vase, including the grouping of a male centaur with his arms around two female centaurs, as well as the drunken Silenus group.

For a smaller vase of the same shape platinum decoration also based on Hähnel’s Dresden Court Theater frieze, see Dr. K. Berling, Meissen China, An Illustrated History, New York, 1972, p. 91, fig. 229.