A Munich manufactory has been making the same sixteen figures since 1760. The eighteenth century ones are museum objects and the new ones are catalogue items, and the gap between those two sentences is the whole story.
Bustelli's figures of about 1760, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
The manufactory
Porzellan Manufaktur Nymphenburg has been making porcelain in Munich since 1747. It still works out of the master workshops on the northern Schlossrondell, the curved run of buildings facing Nymphenburg Palace, which is an unusual thing for a manufactory to have managed. Most houses of that age have long since moved the making to an industrial park and kept the address for the shop. The porcelain paste is made on site. The pieces are formed and finished by hand, and the house describes itself as one hundred per cent handcrafted in Munich and as owner managed. The part that matters most is the painting, and it is the part hardest to replace: the painters work without printed templates. Porcelain painting is protected as cultural heritage by the German UNESCO Commission, which is the sort of designation that arrives when a skill has become rare enough to need protecting.
Bustelli, and the sixteen
Franz Anton Bustelli was taken on at Nymphenburg on 3 November 1754 as a figure maker. He became model master and left around a hundred and fifty models in nine years before he died, in about 1763. Around 1760 he modelled sixteen characters from the commedia dell'arte: Harlequin, Harlequina, Pantalone, Il Dottore, Mezzetin and the rest of the troupe. They are the reason he is generally counted the finest porcelain modeller of the eighteenth century, and they are the reason a specialist can date a figure across a room. The sixteen were first mentioned in the manufactory's records in 1760, and in the manufactory's own words they are "to this day still produced according to his designs". You can order one.
So there are two Harlequins
One was made in the 1760s and sits in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among other collections. The other can be made for you this year, in Munich, in the same buildings, to the same model, painted by hand by someone working without a template. As objects they are the same shape. As assets they are not remotely the same thing, and the distance between them is entirely provenance.
What the market is actually pricing
On 23 October 2024 Dorotheum in Vienna sold a complete set of all sixteen Commedia dell'Arte figures, twentieth century production after Bustelli's models, for a realised EUR 17,160. Sixteen hand painted figures, the full troupe, for a little over a thousand euros each. Single later figures turn up in the German salerooms in the hundreds. An eighteenth century Bustelli is a different market entirely and mostly a museum one. What that spread is pricing is age of ownership, not craft. The later set was made by the same house, in the same city, to the same model, by hand, without templates. It is catalogued as decorative porcelain and priced accordingly. This is the same pattern as an Archibald Knox design sold anonymously through Liberty: the object does not change, the label does, and the label is what carries the money.
Two honest notes before anyone buys
The first is about tooling. It is often said, including in the trade, that the figures come out of Bustelli's original moulds. We could not stand that up. The manufactory's own wording is "according to his designs", which is a careful sentence and probably a deliberate one, and the secondary sources contradict each other outright. Until the house says otherwise in its own words, the claim to make is that the model is Bustelli's, not that the mould is. The second is about what to look at. Because there are no printed templates, no two painted figures are identical, and the painting is most of what separates a good example from an ordinary one. Look at the face and the hands before you look at the mark. If you want to see the work, the gallery on the Schlossrondell is the way in.
At a glance
The TGC view
The maker index exists to answer the question a client asks after they have seen the price: what am I actually paying for. Nymphenburg is the cleanest example we have, because the same object exists at both ends of the spread and only the age of ownership differs. We make the introduction to the gallery, and we say plainly which of the two a buyer is getting.
Want us to arrange it?
We hold the relationships, the rooms and the access. Tell us the dates and we handle the rest.
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