A student of Josef Hoffmann, the versatile artist Hilda Jesser provided designs for the Wiener Werkstätte or Vienna Workshop, and produced works in a wide variety of arts and crafts, including lace, embroidery, printed fabrics and wallpaper, glass decoration, porcelain, leather goods, and commercial graphics. Although she designed very few ceramics, they were among her most commercially successful projects. Jesser paid strict attention to the usability of her works, remained deliberately restrained in her use of color and decoration, and refrained from any gimmicks. In the first half of the 1920s, multiple copies of her ceramic models were made manually, sometimes over a hundred. There are more than 380 copies of Jardinière, one of her most successful designs, with differing coloring and decoration. By this time, the Vienna Workshop had been in existence for nearly 20 years. Founded in 1903, it wasn’t until the summer of 1917 that a separate department for ceramics was set up. The reasons why it took so long to open the ceramics department were the company’s permanent financial difficulties as well as the political and economic conditions. Due to the First World War, mainly women were employed in this production workshop, including Hilda Jesser with her successful ceramic designs.