The coffee pot is made in the red stoneware body that the Meissen factory produced from its foundation in 1710 until 1713, when commercial manufacture of porcelain replaced the production of stoneware. Both materials were developed by the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger. Imprisoned by Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Böttger was ordered first to transmute gold, and then to make porcelain. In 1707 he succeeded in making a red stoneware similar to the Chinese redwares from Yixing, which were much sought after in Europe. The following year he became the first European to make 'true' or 'hard-paste' porcelain of the East Asian type. Most Böttger stonewares - described in factory documents as 'red porcelain' or 'Jasper porcelain' - were made in plaster moulds, often with relief decoration, as here. Many of the vessel shapes derive from European metalwork, and the design of these has traditionally been attributed to the Dresden court goldsmith Johann Jakob Irminger, who is known to have made design models in hammered copper for the factory. This coffee pot, however, has much in common with English Huguenot silver, and may combine elements from French silver prototypes with a spout and scrolled strut derived from Yixing stoneware and Chinese porcelain respectively. The mark is an inventory number for the 'Brown Saxon' wares at the 'Japanese Palace', Dresden, to which some of the factory's unsold stocks of stonewares were transferred in 1733.