Vienna Hofburg - Imperial Apartments, Sisi Museum, Silver Collection

This white and gold dinner service was acquired for Emperor Ferdinand in 1851. Ferdinand, nicknamed “the Good-Natured” by the people, abdicated from the throne during the course of the bourgeois revolution of 1848 in favour of his young nephew, Franz Joseph. Ferdinand subsequently moved to the fortress at Prague, where he lived in quiet retirement until his death in 1875. The white and gold dinner service was ordered for his new household in Prague from the porcelain manufactory of the Counts of Thun at Klösterle in Bohemia. The design of the service was the very height of fashion at that time. Tastes had changed around the middle of the century, with the emphatically clear lines of the Biedermeier era giving way to a softer, more flowing formal idiom. The rich gold decoration expresses the growing need to demonstrate feudal magnificence, a tendency that also made itself felt at the imperial Viennese court.www.hofburg-wien.at | Download Tour-Guide (PDF)© by Schloß Schönbrunn K