Exhibition | Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron
Florist’s Sign and Bracket, 18th century, France, wrought iron and rolled iron, cut, polychromed, and gilded; fastened with rivets and rings. Sign: 28 × 21 × 5 inches (71.5 × 52.6 × 12.5 cm), bracket: 33 × 52 × 2 inches (84 × 132.5 × 6 cm) (Rouen: Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, inv. LS 2011.0.199)
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Now on view at The Barnes Foundation:
Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen
The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, 19 September 2015 — 4 January 2016
Curated by Judith Dolkart with Anne-Charlotte Cathelineau
The world’s most important collection of wrought iron objects—door knockers, garden implements, jewelry, keyhole escutcheons, locks, bas reliefs, signs, strongboxes, surgical tools—from the Musée le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen will complement one of the most intriguing collections at the Barnes Foundation: the 887 pieces of European and American metalwork that punctuate the Foundation’s signature wall arrangements of old master and modern paintings.
Escutcheon, 18th century, France, wrought iron and rolled iron, stamped and with openwork, 19.3 × 16.4 × 0.8 cm (Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, Inv. LS S.N.3)
Albert C. Barnes underscored the formal affinities that these objects shared with the “motives and arabesques” in the paintings in his Gallery, neither identifying individual objects nor explaining their use. Often, he combined disparate objects—shoe buckles and door hinges, ladles and hasps—to create new forms. In a 1942 letter to the American artist Stuart Davis, Barnes noted that the anonymous craftsman of such functional items was “just as authentic an artist as a Titian, Renoir, or Cézanne.”
This exhibition will explore the fabrication, function, and intricate ornamentation of approximately 150 masterworks from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen. They range in date from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, and they show iron as unexpectedly versatile, with its capacity to convey both masculine heft and an impossibly fragile delicacy that is hard to square with its industrial image. Objects ennobled with silver and gold inlays show iron as more than base metal. Some are deadly serious in their efficacy; others delight as much by their wit as by their exquisite intricacy—locks that represent their own function, for example, one with a built-in faithful guard dog or one with spring-loaded manacles ready to catch a lock-pick—an 18th-century sign in the shape of a greyhound that looks like something Calder might have made two centuries later, an early electrified bat-shaped night-light.
Assembled in the 19th century by Jean-Louis-Henri Le Secq Destournelles (1818–1882), the celebrated photographer of French architectural monuments, and his son Henri (1854–1925), the Le Secq collection was shown to great acclaim at the Exposition Universelle in 1900 and installed until the 1920s at the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris. In the early 1920s, Le Secq acquired the deconsecrated church of Saint-Laurent in Rouen, where he lived and arranged his extensive collection of European and Middle Eastern objects by type, in distinctive, often symmetrical, wall arrangements and in custom-made vitrines. Barnes, who traveled frequently to France as he built his collection, is believed to have visited Rouen to see this impressive holding. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue containing an essay on Barnes’s collecting of metalwork, one on the collection at Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, and short essays on groups of works, and an illustrated glossary of technical terms.
The exhibition is curated by Judith F. Dolkart, the Mary Stripp & R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, MA, and former Deputy Director of Art and Archival Collections and Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation. An expert on the art and culture of 19th-century France, Dolkart graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1989 and received an A.B. in fine arts in 1993 from Harvard-Radcliffe College, where she examined the work of Frank Stella for her thesis. In 1997, she earned an M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. During her 2013 fellowship at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, Dolkart was mentored by the director of the Harvard Art Museums and had a week-long residency with the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania.
Anne-Charlotte Cathelineau, curator in charge of the objets d’art at the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, selected the objects included in Strength and Splendor and authored the catalogue’s essay on the holdings in Rouen, as well as several entries on individual objects.
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The catalogue is available from The Barnes Foundation:
Anne-Charlotte Cathelineau, with contributions by Richard Wattenmaker, François Boyenval, Hélène Thomas, and Bruno Varin, Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen (Philadelphia: The Barnes Foundation, 2015), 175 pages, ISBN: 978-0984857869, $65.
The Le Secq collection is the most important holding of wrought iron in the world, combining artistic virtuosity, technological innovation, and whimsy. It was created by Jean-Louis Henri Le Secq Destournelles (1818–1882) and his son Henri-Jean Le Secq des Tournelles (1854–1925). The older Le Secq focused on masterpieces—exceptional objects. The younger Le Secq inherited his father’s enthusiasm and assembled an encyclopedic array of adornments, instruments, and tools, which he catalogued like natural history specimens. He gave the collection to the city of Rouen, where it has been spectacularly displayed in the deconsecrated church of Saint-Laurent since 1921. This catalogue covers some 150 of the most magnificent objects in the Le Secq collection, classed in ten categories—including locks and keys, decorative plaques, and everyday objects—with essays on the history of the Le Secq collection and on the place of
metalwork in the Barnes Foundation.
New Book | Exhibiting the Empire
From Manchester UP (and now 50% off at Oxford UP’s sitewide sale) . . .
John MacKenzie and John McAleer, eds., Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0719091094, $110.
Exhibiting the Empire considers how a whole range of cultural products from paintings, prints, photographs, panoramas and ‘popular’ texts to ephemera, newspapers and the press, theatre and music, exhibitions, institutions and architecture were used to record, celebrate and question the development of the British Empire. The empire was exhibited for a variety of reasons: to promote trade and commerce; to encourage emigration and settlement; to assert, project and cement imperial authority; to digest and display the data and specimens derived from various voyages of exploration and missionary endeavours undertaken in the name of empire; to celebrate and commemorate important landmarks, people or events in the imperial pantheon. By considering a broad sweep of different media and ‘imperial moments’, this collection highlights the contingent and changing nature of imperial display, as well as its continuing impact in Britain throughout (and beyond) the country’s imperial meridian. Exhibiting the empire represents a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the relationship between culture and the British Empire.
Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, individual chapters bring fresh perspectives to the interpretation of media, material culture and display, and their interaction with the history of the British Empire. Exhibiting the Empire will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British history, the history of empire, art history, and the history of museums and collecting.
John M. MacKenzie is Emeritus Professor of Imperial History at Lancaster University and holds Honorary Professorships at the universities of Aberdeen, St Andrews and Stirling, as well as an Honorary Fellowship at Edinburgh University. John McAleer is Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction: Cultures of Display and the British Empire, John MacKenzie and John McAleer
1 An Elite Imperial Vision: Eighteenth-Century British Country Houses and Four-Continents Imagery, Stephanie Barczewski
2 Exhibiting Exploration: Captain Cook, Voyages of Exploration and the Culture of Display, John McAleer
3 Satirical Peace Prints and the Cartographic Unconscious, Douglas Fordham
4 Sanguinary Engagements: Exhibiting the Naval Battles of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Eleanor Hughes
5 Empire under Glass: The British Empire and the Crystal Palace, 1851–1911, Jeffrey Auerbach
6 Ephemera and the British Empire, Ashley Jackson and David Tomkins
7 Exhibiting the Empire in Print: The Press, the Publishing World and the Promotion of ‘Greater Britain’, Berny Sèbe
8. Exhibiting the Empire at the Delhi Durbar of 1911: Imperial and Cultural Contexts, John MacKenzie
9. Elgar’s Pageant of Empire, 1924: An Imperial Leitmotiv, Nalini Ghuman
10. Representing ‘Our Island Sultanate’ in London and Zanzibar: Cross-currents in Educating Imperial Publics, Sarah Longair
Index
Exhibition | Transparent Art: Rock Crystal Carving
Vase in the shape of a dragon or ‘caquesseitão’; Milan, workshop of the Miseroni, possibly Gasparo Miseroni (act. 1550–70) (?) Rock crystal; second half of the 1500s (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado)
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Now on view at the Prado, this exhibition of sixteenth-century carved rock crystal includes items from the collection of the Grand Dauphin (1661–1711). The show also provides a convenient occasion to draw attention to the Prado’s newly designed website, which particularly showcases images. While such a feature might seem obvious for a museum website, it’s hardly been true in most cases to date (the press release detailing the site’s key features is available here).
From the Prado:
Transparent Art: Rock Crystal Carving in Renaissance Milan
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 14 October 2015 — 10 January 2016
Curated by Letizia Arbeteta Mira
The present exhibition offers visitors a unique opportunity to see a little known chapter in art history, namely that of carving hyaline quartz or rock crystal, a technique for which Milan was particularly celebrated in the second half of the 16th century. Due to their value, both material and artistic, these works were only within the reach of monarchs and the highest ranks of the European aristocracy.
The exhibition includes six magnificent examples loaned from two of the most important historical collections: that of the Medici, now in the Museo degli Argenti in Florence, and the collection of Louis XIV, now in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Another fourteen splendid pieces, now in the Prado, come from the collection assembled by the Grand Dauphin of France, son of Louis XIV, which was in part inherited by Philip V, the first Spanish Bourbon monarch, in 1711. The latter group, known as ‘The Dauphin’s Treasure’, entered the Prado in 1839. Although somewhat reduced over the course of its eventful history, it still includes important objects, particularly those in rock crystal. In total it has 47 hyaline quartz vessels, 2 in citrine quartz and 1 in smoky quartz. Various academic studies have attributed these pieces to leading workshops and masters, almost all of them Milanese.
Letizia Arbeteta Mira, Arte transparente: La talla del cristal en el Renacimiento milanés (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 2015), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-8484803362, 39€.
Exhibition | Two Extraordinary Women
Opening next month at UVA:
Two Extraordinary Women: The Lives and Art of Maria Cosway and Mary Darby Robinson
The Fralin Museum of Art, The University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 29 January — 1 May 2016
Curated by Diane Boucher
Francesco Bartolozzi, Maria Cosway (after Richard Cosway), 1786; stipple and engraving, 9 1/2 x 6 in (Langhorne Collection, 2014.EL.1.5)
Two Extraordinary Women: The Lives and Art of Maria Cosway and Mary Darby Robinson examines the intersecting careers of two remarkable women who rose to prominence during the late eighteenth century. One of them, the artist, musician, and educator, Maria Cosway, is now best known as the woman with whom Thomas Jefferson fell in love while serving as American ambassador to France in 1786. The other, Mary Darby Robinson, was a celebrated English actress, former royal mistress, fashion icon, and one of the leading literary figures of her day. Both women were politically active Whig supporters and part of a proto-feminist movement that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. Their ideas were stimulated by the same beliefs in freedom, equality, and democracy that informed the French and American revolutions.
In 1800, Cosway and Robinson collaborated on The Wintry Day, an illustrated poem that contrasted “the evils of poverty with the ostentatious enjoyment of opulence” in Regency England. The publisher, Rudolph Ackermann, described the subject of the poem and its illustrations: “The intention of the designs is to contrast the evils of poverty with the ostentatious enjoyment of opulence.” The exhibition will show how the lives of these two talented women closely resembled the idealized scenes of opulence and luxury in The Wintry Day. However, by juxtaposing these scenes with ones of abject poverty, Cosway and Robinson create a harsh critique of their times, which is in tune with their support of French and American revolutionary ideas on liberty and equality and their proto-feminist ideas on women’s education and the equality of the sexes.
Exhibition | American and European Embroidered Samplers
Now on view at The Met:
American and European Embroidered Samplers, 1600–1900
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 16 November 2015 — 15 February 2016
Maria Boil, Shaker sampler (detail), 1844. American, Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky. Silk and cotton embroidery on linen/cotton; 13 x 12 inches (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008.453)
The embroidered samplers in this installation were chosen for their practical character: each displays skills and knowledge acquired during the educational process and preserves this expertise for future reference. While these are notably functional samplers, even with more decorative examples, the maker’s skill and creativity were tempered by her adherence to traditional patterns, passed down over the years by means of earlier samplers, patterns books, or instructional manuals.
Samplers were made as part of a young woman’s education, either at a formal school or under informal tutelage at home. Through most of the eighteenth century, in both Europe and America, most girls were expected to learn only practical skills—basic reading, writing, and sums, along with sewing and cooking—to prepare them for their roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers.
The Museum has more than eight hundred samplers from Europe and North America. The survival of so many of these embroideries indicates a continuing appreciation for the skill they demonstrate, for their charming variations on a theme, and, perhaps most of all, for the names of the makers, which were proudly added to many of these pieces when their work was done. For many, these samplers are the only remaining trace of the lives they lived.
New Acquisition | Portrait of Yarrow Mamout (Muhammad Yaro)
With cultural and religious ignorance and intolerance finding new, ever uglier modes of expression here in the United States, on what seems a daily basis, this remarkable portrait (a 2011 acquisition by the Philadelphia Museum of Art) usefully speaks to how diverse and complex American history has always been. –CH
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From the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
Charles Willson Peale, Portrait of Yarrow Mamout (Muhammad Yaro), 1819, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2011-87-1).
Yarrow Mamout, an African American Muslim who won his freedom from slavery, was reputedly 140 years old in 1819, when Charles Willson Peale painted this portrait for display in his Philadelphia Museum. Although Peale learned this was a miscalculation, the story of eighty-three-year-old Yarrow (c. 1736–1823), a native of the West African country of Guinea who was literate in Arabic, was still remarkable. As Peale noted, Yarrow was “comfortable in his Situation having Bank stock and [he] lives in his own house.”
A rare representation of ethnic and religious diversity in early America, and an outstanding example of Peale’s late naturalistic style, the picture is distinguished by the direct and sympathetic encounter between the artist and his subject and the skilled rendering of the details of physiognomy and age. Yarrow’s knit cap suggests a kufi, a hat traditionally worn by African Muslim men to assert their religion or African identity, but Peale artfully employs its yellow band to highlight his steady gaze with its glint of humor and wisdom.
Seventy-seven years old when he created this portrait, Peale was seeking a record of the personal traits that he believed supported a long life. In his writings and museum displays Peale celebrated making wise choices to maintain good health and a positive attitude, and he perceived Yarrow’s perseverance through his difficult life as a model of resourcefulness, industriousness, sobriety, and an unwillingness to become dispirited.
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More information about Mamout is available from this piece by Colbert King for The Washington Post (13 February 2015). For Mamout’s biography, see James Johnston, From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family (Fordham University Press, 2012). This past summer, the Historic Preservation Office dug shovel test pits in Georgetown in connection with the Yarrow Mamout Archaeology Project, led by Mia Carey (as reported by WAMU 88.5).
Exhibition | Drawn from Courtly India
Press release (6 November 2015) from the Philadelphia Museum of Art:
Drawn from Courtly India: The Conley Harris and Howard Truelove Collection
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 6 December 2015 — 27 March 2016
Curated by Ainsley Cameron
A Prince and Courtiers in a Garden, ca. 1720–30, with later additions, India (Jodhpur or Bikaner, Rajasthan) (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2013-77-31).
The Philadelphia Museum of Art presents an exhibition of rare and masterful drawings created in the workshops of royal Indian courts over the course of four centuries. Drawn from Courtly India: The Conley Harris and Howard Truelove Collection features a wide range of sketches, preparatory studies, and compositional drawings that vividly depict mythological themes, verdant landscapes and architectural settings, portraits of prominent rulers, and scenes from the lives of Indian nobility. The Museum acquired these important works in 2013, many as a gift, and is presenting the collection in this exhibition for the first time.
While Indian paintings have long been sought after by museums and individual collectors, there has been only a limited interest in drawings. Yet drawings may be wonderful works of art in their own right, yielding a remarkable amount of information about workshop practices and artistic process. Conley Harris, a landscape painter, and the late Howard Truelove, an architectural designer, shared a passion for drawing. They began collecting Indian drawings after being inspired by their travels throughout that country. The collection they assembled over the course of more than a decade provides new insights into the artistic practices of the royal workshops that developed over generations, and offers fresh perspectives on Indian painting. Many of the works to which these collectors were drawn were created during the eighteenth century in the Hindu courts of western India and the Himalayan foothills, an area including the present-day states of Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu-Kashmir.
Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO, stated: “The ongoing development of the Museum’s collection has always represented our partnership with great collectors who have been as passionate as we are about sharing with everyone the finest works of art. In this regard we are especially fortunate to have acquired the marvelous collection assembled by Conley Harris and Howard Truelove, and we are enormously grateful to the collectors. This collection adds a new and important dimension to our holdings of Indian art, which is one of the most important in the country. It also enables us to bring to a broader audience this fascinating and delightful aspect of South Asia’s artistic heritage.”
The first section of the exhibition will feature a group of finished drawings and explore the relationship between court artists and their royal patrons. A second will focus on the innovative workshop process, examining how artists developed and revised drawings through techniques such as white wash corrections, color notations, and pouncing. The drawings in this section will highlight not only the artists’ adept handling of the medium, they will also testify to the collaboration of artists employed within a hierarchical workshop structure, demonstrating how skills were conveyed from master to apprentice. A third section, dedicated to the key moment when brush first meets paper, calls attention to the expressive power of the expert brushstroke. The fourth and final section of the exhibition invites visitors to respond to the works on display by creating their own drawings using workshop techniques.
The exhibition is organized by Ainsley M. Cameron, the Museum’s Ira Brind and Stacey Spector Assistant Curator of South Asian Art. She stated: “These works offer new ways of looking and thinking about Indian courtly drawing. People tend to approach the study of paintings or drawings from the perspective of the patron because so many of the artists’ names are unknown, but we are exploring the perspective of the artist, as maker—the gesture of an artist’s hand, the spontaneity of line, and the process through which ideas are born.”
About Conley Harris and Howard Truelove
Based in Boston, artist Conley Harris (born 1945) is a former faculty member of the department of art and art history at the University of New Hampshire. Harris is known for his lyrical landscapes of New England and the American West. Howard Truelove (1946–2012) was an architectural designer and vice president of design at the firm KlingStubbins in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His interior-design work ranged from public spaces in major office buildings to universities and museums. Harris often uses works in their collection as a source of inspiration, creating paintings that not only absorb motifs from South Asian and Persian miniature paintings, but also play with the idea of multiple layers, the palimpsest found in artists’ working sketches and so creatively reinterpreting the historical drawings for a new generation.
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The catalogue is distributed by Yale UP:
Ainsley Cameron, with an essay by Darielle Mason, Drawn from Courtly India: The Conley Harris and Howard Truelove Collection (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-0300215250, $35.
This publication presents the first in-depth survey of the Conley Harris and Howard Truelove Collection of Indian Drawings, which was recently acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This exceptional collection consists of 65 works on paper created between the 16th and 19th centuries. The Harris-Truelove Collection is uniquely and tightly focused on works from the royal courts of North India, and the majority of these drawings served as preparatory material for the opaque watercolor illustrations that have been widely collected and studied. This catalogue celebrates the assured line of the Indian draftsman and recognizes these drawings as accomplished works of art in their own right. The text details the process and technique involved in their production, and explores what can be revealed by the artist’s hand. The catalogue also contextualizes the role of art production in court culture, and reveals the intricacies of artistic workshop practice.
Ainsley Cameron is the Ira Brind and Stacey Spector Assistant Curator of South Asian Art, and Darielle Mason is the Stella Kramrisch Curator of Indian and Himalayan Art, both at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
New Book | Passion and Control: Dutch Architectural Culture
Forthcoming in January from Ashgate:
Freek Schmidt, Passion and Control: Dutch Architectural Culture of the Eighteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 362 pages, ISBN: 978-0754635819, $120.
Passion and Control explores Dutch architectural culture of the eighteenth century, revealing the central importance of architecture to society in this period and redefining long-established paradigms of early modern architectural history. Architecture was a passion for many of the men and women in this book; wealthy patrons, burgomasters, princes and scientists were all in turn infected with architectural mania. It was a passion shared with artists, architects and builders, and a vast cast of Dutch society who contributed to a complex web of architectural discourse and who influenced building practice. The author presents a rich tapestry of sources to reconstruct the cultural context and meaning of these buildings as they were perceived by contemporaries, including representations in texts, drawings and prints, and builds on recent research by cultural historians on consumerism, material culture and luxury, print culture and the public sphere, and the history of ideas and mentalities.
Freek Schmidt is Associate Professor of Architectural History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Domestic Pleasures
2 Arcadian Territory
3 Royal Ambitions
4 Amateur Passions
5 Reforming Correction
6 Space for Experiment
7 Distinguished Sociability
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
New Book| Luca Carlevarijs
From Artbooks.com:
Dario Succi, Luca Carlevarijs (Gorizia: Libreria Editrice Goriziana, 2015), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-8861022294, $115.
La monografia dedicata a Luca Carlevarijs (Udine 1663–1730 Venezia) offre il panorama completo e scientificamente aggiornato sui dipinti del maestro che inaugurò agli inizi del Settecento la gloriosa stagione del vedutismo veneziano. Compilato da Dario Succi, curatore dell’unica mostra finora dedicata all’artista (Padova, Palazzo della Ragione, 1994), il catalogo contiene nella prima parte la ricostruzione dell’itinerario artistico partendo dai famosi porti di mare e dagli spettacolari ingressi solenni degli ambasciatori esteri nel Palazzo Ducale. Fa seguito la schedatura accurata dei 185 dipinti sicuramente autografi presenti nei musei e nelle collezioni private di tutto il mondo, sottoponendo ad una stringente analisi critica le opere pubblicate in precedenza, separandole da quelle dei seguaci. Splendidamente illustrato con 240 immagini a colori anche a doppia pagina, il volume di 340 pagine intende porsi come riferimento ineludibile per gli amanti dell’arte veneziana, oltre che per studiosi, collezionisti, antiquari.
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The monograph devoted to Luca Carlevarijs (Udine Venice 1663–1730) provides a complete overview and scientifically updated on the paintings of the master who ushered in the early eighteenth century the glorious season of Venetian view painting. Compiled by Dario Succi, curator of the only exhibition dedicated to the artist so far (Padua, Palazzo della Ragione, 1994), the catalog contains the first part of the reconstruction of the artistic starting from the famous sea ports and the beautiful solemn entries of the ambassadors Foreign in the Palazzo Ducale. It follows the filing of accurate 185 paintings definitely autographs in museums and private collections around the world, submitting to a stringent critical analysis works published previously, separating them from those of the followers. Beautifully illustrated with 240 color images even double page, the volume of 340 pages intends to become inescapable reference for lovers of Venetian art, not only for scholars, collectors, antique dealers.
At Bonhams | Meissen Acquisitions
Meissen armorial two-handled beaker and saucer from the service for the Elector Clemens August of Cologne, 1735.
More information is available here»
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Press release (4 December 2015) from Bonhams:
Fine European Ceramics, Sale 22783
Bonhams, London, 2 December 2015
A rare Meissen armorial two-handed beaker and saucer, which once belonged to the Elector Clemens of Cologne, was bought this week at Bonhams Fine European Ceramics sale by the Brühl Palaces Augustusburg and Falkenlust. The UNESCO World Heritage Site, which belonged to the Elector Clemens August of Cologne (1700–1761), is the original home of the service to which this beaker and saucer belonged. Estimated at £50,000–60,000, the lot (#42) sold for £74,500. Bonhams Head of European Ceramics, Nette Megens said, “It’s very satisfying to know that this wonderful beaker is going back to its first home and will be re-united with other pieces from the same service in the Brühl Palaces’ collection.”
Meissen Famille verte vase, ca. 1735
Sold for £74,500.
The other top lot in the sale was a Meissen Famille verte vase from ca. 1735 (lot #40). One of very few examples of Meissen porcelain in the Chinese style, the vase sold for £74,500. Two other Meissen pieces were bought by major international museums confirming the manufactory’s importance in European cultural history.
The Palace Het Loo bought a Meissen soup plate for £6,875, more than double the lot’s pre-sale estimate of £3,000–5,000 (lot #51). The plate, made in the early 1770s, is from the service of Willem V of Orange, Stadholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. The service consists of 435 pieces which over the centuries have been dispersed across a range of museums and private collections. The plate will now join the Het Loo’s collection of around 170 pieces as, little by little, they bring the service together again. “It is one of the earliest Meissen topographical services and what we consider the most important related to the House of Orange,” said Suzanne Lambooy, Curator of Glass and Ceramics at Palace Het Loo. “We are excited to add this plate to our exhibition
as it is has an exceptional decoration depicting a view of
Vlissingen that we did not have before in our collection.”
Large Meissen figure of Paris, ca 1747
Sold for £4,750 (acquired by the V&A)
The Victoria & Albert Museum also purchased a large Meissen figure of Paris from a table centerpiece for £4,750 (lot #67). Reino Liefkes, Senior Curator of Ceramics and Glass at the V&A said: “The V&A is excited about acquiring this Meissen figure, which was originally modeled in 1747 for a grand table-centrepiece in white porcelain which has now been lost. The figure will be acquired with funds from the Capt. H.B. Murray Bequest and will go on display in the Museum’s Ceramics Galleries in due course. A spectacular Meissen centre-piece, also dating from 1747, has recently been restored by the V&A for the Museum’s new Europe 1600–1815 Galleries, which will open next week.”
Armorial Meissen was a further success of the sale. An armorial beaker from 1737 sold for £25,000 and an armorial teabowl and saucer from the service for Christian VI of Denmark sold for £12,500.
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