Chess pieces are small works of art. They have accompanied people since the beginning of the game of chess. The dominance of the Staunton chess pieces, which gradually became mandatory since FIDE was founded in 1924, has unfortunately pushed the artistic beauty and diversity of the game of chess to the edge of perception. Reason enough to take a closer look …
Biedermeier
Unique Hungarien Chess Set
Directoire
Régence
Rowbotham
Russian Chess Set by Artel Kultsport
Calvert
Rustic Antique French Chess Set
Mordovian Temnikov Factory No.5
Helfried’s Finding
Lyon
Belarusian Mushroom
Early English Playing Z
Phrygien (really?)
Tsarist or Soviet? Soviet!
Zuckerdosendeckel
Art Déco
GDR
Some Biedermeier Chess Sets
Toy Sets
Dutch
Very Early
Old English
“According to my information and designs …”
From an artistic perspective, the first decades of the 20th century were also a time of simplification. Since 1910 (Kandinsky) there has been conscious abstraction and stylization. Movements such as Art Déco and Constructivism, Rayonism, Orphism, Cubism and Futurism were almost commonplace. It would therefore be easy to dismiss the “Deutsche Bundesform” as a Nazi work. If you look at the beauty of the stylization and then use high-quality materials such as horn, then you are suddenly faced with elegant Art Déco chess pieces.
Iconic Hungarian Chess Set
Tribal Art – Malawi
Modern Times
Café Laudon
Two Tribes
German Horn
Dutch or German 19th Century Playing Set
Mysterious Moro
Augarten Chess
The secret of porcelain production came to Vienna in 1718 with Claudius Innocentius du Paquier. There he received the privilege of producing porcelain from Emperor Charles VI. The Porzellangasse in Vienna's 9th district is still a reminder of this today. In 1744 the manufactory came into imperial possession. With the collapse of the monarchy, the company was re-established in 1923 at a new location: in Vienna's Augarten. At the same time, the company was known as the “Porzellanmanufaktur Augarten”.
Chess collector Alex Hammond wrote in “The Book Of Chessmen” in 1950: “The Imperial Viennese porcelain factory made chessmen in ceramic in the eighteenth century. This practice was discontinued for many years, only reviving again about twenty-four years ago, when a fair number of beautiful pieces in classic style were made, some in black and white but others decorated and gilt.”
When asked about this, the art historian Claudia Lehner-Jobst from the Augarten Porcelain Manufactory contacted me. Claudia Lehner-Jobst: “As far as I know, the imperial factory did not produce any chess sets in the 18th or 19th centuries, although games of all kinds were an important part of court life and there are some very nice tins with playing chips from the Baroque period.” A chess set was added to the product range as early as 1924. (see photos). The playful Art Déco design comes from the artist Mathilde Jaksch, who created numerous, some very popular, designs for Augarten. Very little is known about Mathilde Jaksch; she was born in 1899 and received artistic training in Vienna and Gmunden. At this point we would like to thank Claudia Lehner-Jobst for her help. Hammond continues in the book: “Those people who secured a set of these very pretty and entirely playable pieces before the Second World War may consider themselves fortunate—for the factory, together with all its moulds, was destroyed during the War. An inquiry made on behalf of the author recently was answered by the statement that the whole of the moulds had been destroyed by bombing and nothing further in this line could be supplied.” The chess set can still be bought at Augarten today, so it is obvious that after the moulds were lost, they had to have been remade. Our inquiry as to whether the post-war pieces were modeled after the original chess pieces or whether only a mould was made from existing pieces has not yet been answered. This is interesting because the post-war chess pieces in the latter case would have to be significantly smaller than the chess pieces from 1924 due to the shrinkage during firing (about 20%!).
St. George Chessmen
The unforgettable Nicholas Lanier noted on his website: “The St. George chess pieces got their name from the St. George Club, founded in 1843 on the street of the same name in central London, which chose these chessmen as part of the club set. (…) As a result, St. George sets were made not only by the leading manufacturer Jaques, but also by other chess piece turners, such as Lund, Fisher, Hastilow, Calvert, Ayres, etc., sometimes in unusual and opulent versions in ivory and mixed materials. St. George sets were also made in very cheap variations for the toy market – also by Jaques. Interestingly, St. George sets were also produced in Germany from the middle of the 19th century … .”