The Salt Lady arrived this morning and I'm quite happy with her. The colors are a little more muted in reality than they appear in the photos, which is good, since I was a little concerned that they might be overly bright compared to the rest of the blue and white china.
What looked like label residue in the photo is actually a rough place where whatever her original marking was, it appears to have been scraped off. So it looks like she is a factory second from somewhere. It's difficult to know weather or not Meissen released seconds or not. I found only the one Ebay guide that claimed that Meissen did not release seconds. All the other sources I found said that they did. I guess the jury is still out on that one!
Age-wise I think that the early 1900's estimate by the seller is probably pretty a fair one, and I would guess that she was probably produced about the time that the Meissen pieces were popular, or a little after. The skirt is a transferware design, while the rest is hand-painted, except for the cheeks, which I think are air-brushed, so like the chinahead doll, I believe that would put her production in the 1920's, at about the end of the time when open salt cellars fell out of popularity. Her face is very nicely painted, not skewed at all, and she has the same "rosebud" pursed painted lips that you see on the chinahead dolls from around this time and tiny dots of blush color in the nostrils. Whoever did the face did a really good job.
There is just the tiniest bit of rubbing visible to the blue at the edges of the basket, some wear to the base bottom and a bit of dust staining in the deepest crevices. This is most noticable on the two flowers, which do not have the shiny finish glaze. The flowers were formed by making layers with the petals like a real flower would have. They could not have been popped out of a mold and there is dust grime down inside them.
No chips anywhere, it looks like she has had a pretty easy life in a china hutch.
