In addition to jewelry, Russian icons and works by Faberge, the gallery is showing 30 solid-silver dinner plates owned by the daughter of Nicholas I, Russian drinking glasses with the portrait of Nicholas I and several spectacular porcelain dishes from the rare, circa 1826, Nicholas I coronation service.
22.
It doubled as a serving base for elaborate porcelain dishes and glass trays containing fruits, bonbons and sweetmeats, from which the hosts and their guests could help themselves while socialising or stretching their legs between the multiple courses being served on the main table in the dining hall.
23.
This ornamental naturalism, with its optically stimulating patterns and hyper-real colors, was an Edo hallmark, and it is everywhere here : in the eyelash-thin birds painted on a man's lacquer purse, in the stenciled flowers exploding across a silk robe, in a porcelain dish the size of a saucer covered with magnified snowflakes.
24.
Stenbitsrom sells in much larger volume than L�jrom, but it has two drawbacks : it tastes little more than its salt and artificial additives, and the colour additives tend to bleed into other parts of the food you serve it with ( such as a boiled egg ), or to discolour the porcelain dish.
25.
Guests would arrive midmorning and visit the studio and the greenhouses, and then sit down to a lavish lunch, always served on a table covered with a yellow tablecloth with either blue Creil earthenware in the pattern Japon or, on the most special occasions, white porcelain dishes with a wide yellow border and blue edging.
