Vase with Handles

Hilde Jesser-Schmidt studied with Oskar Strnad and Josef Hoffmann at the Applied Arts School before joining the the Wiener Werkstätte in 1916. Later in 1922, she became an instructor at the school, a position she held for forty-four years. Her training was closely tied with Hoffmann and the school rather than with the ceramic workshops of Powolny and Loffler. According to Jesser-Schmidt's own account, her broad-ranging work includes designs for embroidery, fabric, tapestries, and decoration for etched and painted glass, porcelain, leather goods, and commercial graphics. She also produced ceramic work and painted furniture and wooden boxes with her own designs. Jesser Schmidt's ceramic designs, including this vase with handles, are closely linked with the painterly decoration of her fabrics and tapestries. They also exhibit a taste for oriental motifs, such as exotic flora and fauna. On a formal level, this oriental sensibility takes on an angular, art deco quality seen in four-sides vessels with stepped, folded, or sharply creased corners and playful, curving handles. In this work, the form of the base evokes the shape of Japanese paper lanterns. Its decoration combines a speckled ground that suggests the texture of raw silk painted with fanciful plant and animal motifs. (Skrypzak, Design Vienna 1890s to 1930s, no. 48)