LA BELLE CHOCOLATIERE

A Beautiful Chocolate Server Who Became a Princess

Trademarks in the United States were an important way to have the public readily identify with a product or brand of food, but it was not until October 25, 1870, that the first trademark in this country was registered in the United States Patent Office. Known to be unofficially used before the Civil War by many companies, Walter Baker & Company initially employed a comely maiden with a cornucopia, from which Baker chocolate and cocoa products cascaded. However, it was Henry Lillie Pierce who adopted a beloved pastel portrait from the Gemaldegalerie alte Meister in Dresden, Germany, as his official trademark. It was registered in the patent office in 1881 and soon became one of the most identifiable trademarks in the food industry in the United States.

La Belle Chocolatiere is the official trademark of the Baker Chocolate Company. Though she has been used as the trademark of this delicious industry, La Belle was once an Austrian princess. In the mid-eighteenth century, chocolate shops were quite popular in Europe, and many fashionable people stopped into these shops for a cup of hot chocolate during the cold weather. La Belle, or Anna Baltauf (ca. 1740–1825), was the daughter of Melchior Baltauf, a knight of the Austrian court, and lived in Vienna. The fact that she was a chocolate server has never been fully explained or understood, but whether she was earning wages as a chocolate server or did it as a lark, she was said to have met her future husband one cold winter afternoon in 1760.

The story, as related to Henry Lillie Pierce, was that Anna Baltauf was serving chocolate in a shop in Vienna one afternoon when Dietrichstein, a prince of the Austrian Empire, entered for a cup of hot chocolate. Serving the cup of chocolate with a glass of water, Anna captivated the prince with her beauty, and their courtship culminated in marriage. On her wedding day, Anna was quoted as saying to her fellow chocolate bearers, “Behold! Now that I am a princess you may kiss my hand.” Prince Dietrichstein, to capture and preserve his consort’s beauty, had her portrait painted in the costume in which he had first met her. The artist, Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–1790) was in Vienna at that time as painter to the court. He had recently completed portraits of the Empress Maria Theresa and other members of the imperial family and court, but this painting of Anna was probably one of the most charming of his portraits. Anna, however, lived an uneventful life after her courtship and marriage and died in Vienna in 1825.

Das Schokoladenmadchen is a portrait by Jean-Etienne Liotard of Anna Baltauf as a chocolate server in Vienna in 1765. Henry Lillie Pierce had this pastel portrait copied and renamed La Belle Chocolatiere. Since 1883, La Belle Chocolatiere has been the trademark of Walter Baker & Company. Courtesy of Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.

The portrait, which hangs in the Royal Portrait Collection of the Dresden Gallery in Dresden, Germany, was seen by Henry Lillie Pierce in 1862 on one of his many trips to Europe. Taken by the likeness, and by the appropriate fact that the subject was a chocolate server, Pierce requested that a copy be made for the Baker Chocolate Company offices in Dorchester. The copy, a large, full-length canvas, was shipped to this country and installed in the Pierce office. By 1872, La Belle had become the trademark of the oldest chocolate manufacturer in this country, whose product would be known throughout the world for being a “perfect food, as wholesome as delicious, a beneficent restorer of exhausted power.”

Pierce, like the Baker family before him, extolled the virtues of chocolate as nourishing and easily digestible, as well as a delicious beverage when made properly. Baker’s Chocolate advertisements during the mid- and late nineteenth century said that its chocolate “soothes both stomach and brain, and for this reason, as well as for others, it is the best friend of those engaged in literary pursuits.”

A young demonstrator poses in 1904 as she frosts a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, all made from the Choice Recipes cookbooks, which were available gratis to the public.

The demonstrators, comely young women who dressed as the trademark come to life, were an important part of the workforce in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These women wore brown silk dresses with aprons, bonnets and sashes in fine white linen, as well as gloves. The A.W. Tams Company of 318 West Forty-sixth Street in New York City made many of these demonstrator costumes, which were individually boxed in leather cases so the women could travel from venue to venue with their outfits. According to Margaret S. MacGillivary, former secretary of Henry Lillie Pierce, in 1893 the costumes of the demonstrators were made by a “fashionable dress-making house on Boylston St. [in Boston], at a cost of $80.00 per girl. This included waist of gold satin, skirt of blue taffeta silk, cap of silk trimmed with lace.” The cost was tremendous considering that employees earned twelve dollars per week on average in 1900. Miss MacGillivary commissioned C.F. Hovey & Company on Summer Street in Boston to make the linen parts of the costumes, which “cut down the expense of these costumes tremendously.”

Today, the pastel portrait of Das Schokoladenmadchen can be admired at the Gemaldegalerie alte Meister in Dresden, Germany.