Limited Masterworks Vase Passionflower & Hummingbirds

Both the quietly spoken "Nova" vase shape and the decorative detail were authored by the artist Zhuoyu Hou, whose work for MEISSEN is very extensively characterised by out-of- the-ordinary, organic, fluid formal devices such as these. Climbing plants often wend their way from tree to tree in the Brazilian jungle and their red flowers, which assume unique, ever-changing shapes in some cases, make a very wild and vibrant impact. The colours used more than do justice to the colourful array of life in the rain forest: the muted greens and blues of the humming-birds are offset by flower-heads of a sensuous redness and by areas of gilding. Diagrammatic tendrils and leaves are juxtaposed by blooms and birds rendered in a breezy, naturalistic manner. The dark-grey ground really brings out the splendour of the colours to the full. A further exciting point of note are the shadows cast by the passion flowers and birds, which seemingly cause these features to hover above the vase's surface.
Largest rain forest, most species-rich savannah, greatest volume of fresh water: the Amazon is truly a region of superlatives. The unique flora and fauna in this much abused area of the world have already found their way onto a great many MEISSEN artworks. The inspiration for the present scheme came from works by the American painter Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904). Heade lived in Brazil for two years from 1863, where he worked on a series of over 40 smaller-format paintings having humming-birds, wild orchids and passion flowers as their main motifs.