The plastic qualities and the infusibility of the paste, together with the thinness of the coat of glaze, enabled the artist to obtain a clearer and sharper reproduction of his model than was ever possible with the soft pastes and the thick lead glazes of the English imitations.[158] The best of these little figures, however, belong to rather later times, for during the last years of Augustus the Strong (he died in 1733) Kändler was occupied with more ambitious commissions--life-sized figures of the twelve apostles, an equestrian statue of the king, and figures of animals, to decorate the new rooms of the Japanese palace. But these attempts to employ porcelain as a material for monumental sculpture (in the style of Bernini) ended in failure. There is at South Kensington a series of figures in plain white, dating from this period, apparently destined to form part of a small fountain, and from these a very good idea of this application of the ware can be formed. It was about this time, or a little earlier, that the passion for porcelain flowers, generally in plain white ware, spread through Europe. These or similar ornaments were even fastened to ladies’ dresses,--witness the _gros papillons en porcelaine de Saxe_, which we hear of as sewed on to the state-dress of a French _marquise_. This was the ware that it paid best to manufacture, both here and at Saint-Cloud and Vincennes. Porcelain flowers were applied at a later time to the whole surface of a vase. These ‘Schneeballen vasen,’ as they are called in Germany, were even reproduced at King-te-chen for exportation to Europe.[159] With the employment of professional artists--flower-painters, landscape-painters, and painters of _genre_ scenes--to adorn the surface of the already glazed ware with miniature pictures, a style of decoration came in, if decoration it can be called, which became more and more the dominant note of European porcelain during the next hundred years. The flower-painter came first with realistic, well-shaded little nosegays, in the style of the Dutch painters of the day; then landscapes, views of real towns, sometimes in a purple-red monochrome, and surrounded by a gold rococo frame to imitate that of an oil picture. The free use of gold, however, in the European porcelain of this time, was to some extent a saving point. It helped, as gold always does, to pull together the decoration. On the earlier Meissen ware the gold is most solidly applied and has worn well. The palmy days of the Meissen factory, when seven hundred workmen were employed and large profits made, came to an end with the Seven Years’ War. Frederick, in 1759 and again in 1761, looted the Albrechtsburg and carried away to Berlin the models and moulds as well as many choice pieces of porcelain. The rest of the stock was sold by auction, and the archives of the works were at the same time destroyed.