Miniaturists Animalistic


Johann Gregor Höroldt was a German porcelain artist who developed the Meissen porcelain style. Höroldt was trained as a miniature and enamel painter.
Between 1719 and 1720 he worked at the porcelain manufactory in Vienna, recently founded by Du Pacquier, and then moved to Meissen and began his collaboration with the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory. In 1724 he was appointed court painter. In 1731, Höroldt became an arcanist (a chemist, a key figure in porcelain production), and was simultaneously appointed head of the entire painting department and court commissioner.
Höroldt influenced virtually all European porcelain and faience manufactories. He specialized in the fashionable and popular chinoiserie design, but also introduced European landscapes, harbor and battle scenes, still lifes, and bird images as porcelain decoration.
The artist also significantly expanded the palette of colors used in Meissen: in the early XVIII century. was available only five paints for glaze, and Höroldt by 1731 increased the palette to 16 colors. He attached great importance and the original form for porcelain, trying to make it different from the usual dishes.


August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof was a German entomologist and zoologist, naturalist and miniature painter.
He graduated from the Nuremberg Academy of Artists and was practicing miniature painting and printmaking when he became acquainted with the works of the artist and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian. Her famous Surinam book of 1705 inspired Rösel to create a similar book, but with illustrations of the plants and animals of Germany.
Rösel began to study natural sciences, he collected insects, caterpillars and butterflies, observed their metamorphosis and wrote down his observations accompanied by pictures. From 1740 Rösel published the results of his scientific and artistic work: the Monthly Entertainments of Insects, in four volumes. He also published Historia naturalis Ranarum nostratium, devoted to the frogs of Germany. In the quality of the illustrations this book is one of the most beautiful about these animals.