A German porcelain armorial dinner plate from the Grand Duke Paul Petrovich Service

The present plate forms part of the service commissioned on 5 June 1778 by Frederick the Great, for Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, later Tsar Paul I (1796-1801). Grand Duke Paul Petrovich was the son of Peter III (1762) (whose father was Karl Friedrich, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp) and Catherine the Great (1762-1796), whose grand-father was Prince Christian August of Holstein-Gottorp (1673-1726). Following the death of his first wife in childbirth in 1773, Grand Duke Paul Petrovich married the beautiful Sophia Dorothea Württemberg in 1776, at which time she changed her name to Maria Feodorovna. On the birth of their first child in 1777, Empress Catherine II gave her son the estate at Pavlovsk.

For another plate from this service see Erich Köllmann and Margarete Jarchow, Berliner Porzellan, Munich, 1887, vol. ii, p. 449, fig. 291a.