Limited Masterworks Female Dancer Loie Fuller

The American danseuse Marie Louise, aka "Loie", Fuller (1862-1928) made her debut in Paris in November 1892. Within a few years, the city had placed a dance theatre at her disposal on the occasion of the 1900 Paris Exhibition in which, thenceforth, she captivated audiences with an utterly novel programme of veil dances and lighting arrangements replete with special effects.

The MEISSEN sculptor and porcelain modeller Karl Theodor Eichler spent part of 1906 studying in the French capital at the manufactory's instigation. Maybe he attended one of her evening performances; the extraordinary vivacity and verity of the "Danseuse" model he produced in porcelain in 1911 would certainly seem to suggest he actually experienced Ms Fuller in the flesh. Eichler's work is generally classified as being located somewhere between art nouveau and new functionalism. This would explain why he left the original in plain white with no decoration at all, in keeping with his matter-of-fact approach of keeping to the bare essentials.

Painter Beate Sommer opted to decorate Loie's dress with Japanese cherry blossom against a sky-blue ground for the present edition. The blossom looks very gossamery and light and the white of the porcelain really brings out its radiant beauty to the full. Beate Sommer has given the blossom a captivatingly three-dimensional quality by rendering it in subtle gradations of light to dark pink. Any danseuse would dream of appearing on the world's great stages dressed in such scintillating manner.