Just when you think the 18th century on view in New York today can’t get any better, “The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain, 1710–50,” on view at the Frick Collection through June 29, joins with the UBS Art Gallery’s “Josiah Wedgwood and His Circle” and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s “Rococo” to provide us with an even fuller picture of that central century of the modern age. The Arnhold show gathers 100 or so pieces from one of the world’s most important collections of early Meissen. These pieces have never before been the subject of a major public exhibition.

The Chinese perfected hard-paste porcelain by the sixth century. It took Europeans another 12 centuries to figure it out. The first to do it were the 18th-century Saxons, in particular an alchemist named Johann Friedrich Böttger, in 1708. Augustus, Elector of Saxony, had retained Böttger to make gold, at which the alchemist had failed. He did, however, come up with the next best thing, or so it must have seemed at the time. For all Europe was trying, and failing, to master the Chinese art of porcelain. The preceding century had brought tea and coffee to Europe; the quest for porcelain was in part bound up with the desire for appropriate vessels for the new beverages. Following Böttger’s success, Augustus immediately opened a royal porcelain works outside of Dresden, in the town of Meissen. (Böttger was greatly aided by the mining and scientific expertise found in the Saxon city of Freiberg.)

In addition to the fact that these pieces have previously only existed for private viewing, another excellent thing about the Arnhold show is that the Frick Collection itself notably lacks examples of Meissen. There’s plenty of Chinese stuff and Sèvres porcelain from France (which eventually overtook Meissen in prestige), but none of what’s now so amply on display, affording a rich opportunity to compare and contrast.

In 1720, the Meissen Porcelain Factory hired the painter Johann Gregorius Höroldt. Höroldt not only established the ornamental patterns for Meissen’s porcelain but, as a chemist, he also experimented with colors, inventing 16 new enamel colors: light, flashing tones that made the porcelain sing. We see early Höroldt work in a pair of tea bowls and saucers from 1723–24, bearing domestic scenes in purples and golds with background skies in a dreamily dramatic Chinese landscape style. Augustus owned a large collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelain that inspired Höroldt, who developed Meissen’s own strain of chinoiserie, which we see repeatedly in the show, sometimes just in minute details.

In his four small bowls from 1725, we see Höroldt’s chinoiserie vignettes together, with the most delicate lavender bands setting off the snow-white porcelain. In a section of the show devoted to chinoiserie (though the style is evident throughout the exhibition) we find — attributed to “a Dutch workshop” — one of the finest such pieces in the show, a small teapot with cover from 1724, elegantly patterned in a burgundy-red hay-weave bordering patches of delicate floral imagery.

One of my favorite pieces in the show, a clock case with gilt-metal mounts (c. 1728–30), is gold and white with delicately traceried red vegetative swirls, the case bedecked by fully modeled bare-breasted maidens and quite authoritative cherubs. Its side paintings are in a chinoiserie manner. A mounted group from 1728–30, attributed to George Fritzsche, has a black-beaked bird with a coat patterned with what look like colored Easter eggs. The bird looks determinedly at a bearded Asian sage, his figure entirely white except for his brown, tendrilly beard and red lips.

For the whole period covered by the Frick show, Höroldt was the dominant force in the surface decoration of Meissen’s porcelain. The sculptor Johann Joachin Kändler arrived in 1731 and, thereafter, he and Höroldt uneasily shared artistic charge of the factory. Kändler introduced elaborately shaped porcelain to Meissen, producing much of what we think of when we think of early Meissen. The shaped pieces — figurines, bunches of flowers, animals — made the painters subservient to the sculptors. In simpler pieces, the porcelain surface could be considered a “canvas” for colored decoration. Kändler’s works abound in the show. An exquisite, tiny two-handled bowl with cover, said to be possibly by Kändler, from 1735 or 1738, has handles beginning as twisting vines in white porcelain that spread deliriously, erupting in elaborately modeled roses and leaves all around the bowl.

Kändler could make porcelain flowers seem more flower-like than real flowers. He is famous for his figurine groups, frivolous scenes of lovemaking in festive colors — yellow, pastel blue, pink, light green — with flowered gowns and checkered clown suits, as we see in examples from between 1736 and 1745. His Pantalone and Columbine figures, part of his famous and influential series of commedia dell’arte scenes from 1740, are a delight. His similarly colored and vivacious hen and rooster serve as a cruet and mustard pot (c. 1737–39). Kändler’s “Vase Representing Earth” (c. 1741–42), made for Louis XV of France, is a deeply, complexly modeled Rococo swirl of bounding deer and other animals, and paper-thin leaves in stunning profusion.

A tour de force, unattributed, is the mounted group “La Cage.” As I looked at it, the man next to me uttered a conventional “disgusting.” What a perfectly unhelpful way to feel about something like this! Some of the pieces in the show may indeed appear to viewers as so much frou-frou, but to view an important show and not be able to reach beyond your own taste is a very sad thing. The “disgusting” work featured gilt-bronze mounts, frivolous lovers, lambs, and a pug dog beneath a tree spreading out in a canopy of (seemingly) spun-sugar flowers in happy colors. Wow! Throughout, we see teapots, mustard pots, saucers, vases, bottles, plates, coffee pots, and figurines, not one without interest either for its shapes or its colors. This isn’t just the beginning of Western porcelain, but of 18th-century art, and we are beholden to the Arnhold Collection and its curator, Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, and to the Frick, for bringing this show to New York.