The exhibition presents the achievements of European ceramicists who managed to reconstruct ceramics in the local manufacturing companies known earlier only on the far east. Along with the tea which was being imported to Europe from China since the beginning the 17th century, also the little small teapots made out of the red stoneware clayware being imported which let to get the plenitude of taste-aromatic values of prepared infusion. Nevertheless it had to pass almost a century so that that kind of teapots started being produced in Europe, and then the entire services to drinking the tea, the coffee and the chocolate were being formed. The popularity of new drinks and an original way of serving it caused the appearance of new special premises and the clients were eagerly spending there time enjoying a cup of an aromatic infusion. During the exhibition in the Museum in the King John III Palace in Wilanów we present the earliest, unique examples of dishes made out of the red stoneware clay from the end the 17th century, burnt by the Dutch champion of teapots Ary de of Milde and by Elers brothers form England. An exceptional source of pride is the biggest polish team of the stoneware clay of Johann Friedrich Böttger, the famous alchemist and the prisoner of August Mocny who managed to open the first European manufacture of porcelain in Miśnia town. In the collection of the Museum of the King John III Palace there appear also red stoneware from Staffordshire from second half of the 18th century, when the fashion for this type of ceramics bloomed again. More rare are the imitations of red products associated with the Brandenburgian manufacturing company in Plaue on the Havel, similarly to the counterfeit of black classical dishes which are the work effect of Ignacy Ceyzik, the author with great talent and the fate full of the tragedy. The exhibition „Wokół herbaty, kawy i czekolady” superbly becomes a part of a program of a reconstruction of Old Polish dispensing and serving well-known to previous centuries, carried out by the Museum of the Palace in Wilanów. One cannot forget that the boiling is also an art. There are three published historical sets of recipes to prove that, the oldest Polish cookbooks provided with outstanding reviews and richly illustrated with photographs of functional art. The exhibition of red and black dishes for serving an aromatic substances is supplemented with an examples of other china products, the gloss paint, silver and pieces of silver- cutlery from the collection of a museum, with cards of patterns of companies manufacturing products of this type, drawings of former maps and herbarium ideas of plants which changed the culinary taste in Europe.
(photographs: Museum of the Palace in Wilanów, on first one – a chocolate maker, Miśnia, about 1740, painted china over glazed with crimson of the manganese, gold-plated; filed, gilded bronze; wood of the pear tree stained, on second one – a Teapot in the shape of the eagle Irminger Johann Jacob (1635? – 1724) – model Dresden or Miśnia, about 1711, red stoneware clay with the graphite-grey exterior surface (Eisenporzellan), carved from the form).
