Gossamer-like and stylishly poised, ethereal floral tendrils reach up towards the sky, filling the summer air with a lovely fragrance that stirs the soul. Porcelain painter Silvia Krug has always thrilled to the beauty and fragrance of the sweet pea as it performs its annual spectacle in her summer garden and has now dedicated a motif of her own to this native climbing plant. The powdery, purple ground plays an active part in the design, heightening the pea vine's formal properties. Its full round flowers adapt nicely to the bulbous body of the vase, a contemporary piece by Meissen designer Sabine Wachs. Meissen's porcelain painters have been articulating a longing for harmony and beauty through the medium of flower painting for a great many generations now. They delight in picking out a given flower's distinctiveness, fine detail and irregularities to optimum effect. Decades of specialisation are needed to be able to produce work of this kind and quality, in the course of which a capacity for abstraction and highly precise brushwork is acquired. Each succeeding era spawns its own style to give rise to yet another fresh heyday in flower painting.