Alain.R.Truong

Lot 12. Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Lot and his Daughters, oil on canvas, 74 x 88½in. (190 x 225cm.), including early 18th century horizontal additions to top and bottom edges of circa 18 and 10cm. wide. Price Realized £44,882,500 ($58,167,720) (€52,422,760). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

LONDON.- The Old Master and British Evening Sale totalled £65,390,100/ $84,745,570/ €76,375,637, achieving sell through rates of 93% by value and 77% by lot.

The highest price for an Old Master Painting sold at Christie’s was achieved with the sale of Peter Paul Rubens’s Lot and his Daughters, which realised £44,882,500 / $58,167,720 / €52,422,760 in a spirited 14-minute bidding war.

Henry Pettifer, International Director, Head of Old Master & British Paintings Christie’s London: “Following the curated 250th anniversary Defining British Art sale we are delighted with the results of this Old Masters evening’s auction totalling £65,390,100 which gives us a combined running total of £105,373,775, the result of strong bidding from not only our traditional collectors for the category but also new clients from Asia and collectors of 20th Century art. We are especially pleased with the sale of Ruben’s‘Lot and his Daughters’, for £44,882,500, the most expensive Old Master Painting ever sold by Christie’s. The atmosphere in the saleroom was energetic as one of the most important paintings by Rubens to have remained in private hands sold after 14 minutes of bidding. The sale of this work follows the record sale by Christie’s of two Rembrandt Portraits sold by private treaty to the French and Dutch states earlier this year, demonstrating the continued demand of collectors for the very best Old Master works. Christie’s first Classic Week in London has been a fitting context for a work of such calibre, displayed alongside the full range of unique works of art offered throughout the week. Tonight’s sale achieved sell through rates of 93% by value and 77% by lot and attracted cross-category buying with registered bidders from 25 countries across 5 continents. Top prices were realised at all price levels, with notable highlights including‘The Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter’ by Pieter Brueghel II which sold over estimate achieving £6,466,500, Bellotto’s pair of panoramas of the Grand Canal Venice which realised £3,554,500 and Jacob van Ruisdael’s ‘View of Harlem’ that reached £1,538,500."

1-2

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Lot and his Daughters (details). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Rubens’s Lot and his Daughters in its original format, without additions to the top and bottom.

Provenance: Balthazar Courtois (d. 1668), Antwerp, and by descent to his son, Jan Baptist Courtois.
Ghisbert van Ceulen (or Colen), Antwerp; purchased from him, 17 September 1698, by
Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria (1662-1726), Munich, from where appropriated in 1704 for the following
Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor (1678-1711), by whom presented to the following
John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), in the Great Room at Marlborough house by 1740, moved to the Library at Blenheim Palace by 1766, and by 1810 in the Dining Room, thence by descent at Blenheim to George Charles, 8th Duke of Marlborough (1844-1992); purchased before the Blenheim sale (London, Christie's, 24 July 1886 et seq.) by Sedelmeyer, Paris, for Baron Maurice de Hirsch de Gereuth (1831-1896), and by descent.
Madame la Baronne de Hirsch de Gereuth; Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 17 June 1904, lot 38 (unsold or bought back).
with Jules Féral, Paris by 1905 (unsold and returned to the family above) and by descent.

Literature: British Library, Add MS 61473: 1740-1741, ‘Inventory of Blenheim & Marlborough House, signed by S. Duchess – 1740’, as located in the Great Room at Marlborough House.
The New Oxford Guide, 4th ed., Oxford, 1765, p. 94.
T. Martyn, The English Connoisseur, I, London, 1766, p. 24, as located in the Library at Blenheim, over the bookcases.
A New Pocket Companion for Oxford, Oxford, 1783, pp. 101-102, as located in the Dining Room at Blenheim.
W.F. Mavor, New Description of Blenheim, Oxford, 1787, p. 39.
J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French Painters, London, 1830, II, p. 247, no. 839; p. 299, no. 1079.
J.D. Passavant, Kunstreise durch England und Belgien, Frankfurt am Main, 1833, p. 176, no. 12: English edition, Tour of a German Artist in England, London, 1836, II, p. 8, no. 12.
G.F. Waagen, Art and Artists in England, London, 1838, II, p. 236: ‘…excites an admiration of the skill, the energy of the artist, but is at the same time repulsive, on account of the vulgarity of the forms and characters. The charm of truth is also wanting in the blue half tints, the red reflections, and the bright light in the flesh’, located in the Dining Room at Blenheim.
G.F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, London, 1854, III, p. 130, no. 16.
G. Scharf, Catalogue Raisonné; or, A List of the Pictures in Blenheim Palace, London, 1861, p. 22.
M. Rooses, L'Oeuvre de P.P. Rubens. Histoire et description de ses tableaux et dessins, I, pp. 123-124, no. 103; V, 1892, p. 311, no. 103, as ‘première époque de Rubens, fait par un élève, retouché par le Maître’
C. Sedelmeyer, Illustrated Catalogue of 300 Paintings by Old Masters of the Dutch, Flemish, Italian, French, and English Schools, being some of the Principal Pictures which have at Various Times Formed Part of the Sedelmeyer Gallery, Paris 1898, no. 158, illustrated.
A. Rosenberg (ed.), P.P. Rubens. Des Meisters Gemälde, (Klassiker der Kunst V), Stuttgart-Leipzig, 1906, pp. 54, 466; R. Oldenbourg (ed.), 4th ed., Stuttgart-Berlin, 1921, pp. 40, 456.
E. Dillon, Rubens, London, 1909, pl. XLI.
E. Buchner, Katalog der Älteren Pinakothek, Munich, 1936, p. XIV.
G. Fubini, J.S. Held, ‘Padre Resta's Rubens Drawings after Ancient Sculpture’, Master Drawings, II, 1964, p. 137.
J. Muller Hofstede, 'Aspekte der Entwurfszeichnung bei Rubens', Akten Kongress Bonn 1964, Berlin, 1967, III, pp. 117-118, pl. 183.
A.F. de Mirimonde, '"Loth et ses filles" de Verhaghen. Evolution d'un thème', Revue du Louvre, XXII, 1972, p. 376, fig. 8.
R.A. D'Hulst, M. Vandenven, P.S. Falla, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, III, London, 1989, p. 50-51, no. 8, pl. 19, (incorrectly located as in Biarritz, Private Collection).
M. Jaffé, Rubens: Catalogo Completo, Milan, 1989, p. 181.
T. Murdoch (ed.), Noble Households: Eighteenth-Century Inventories of Great English Houses. A Tribute to John Cornforth, Cambridge, 2006, p. 284.

Engraved: Willem de Leeuw (1603–1665), Antwerp.

Copies: The Corpus Rubenianum (op. cit.) lists three anonymous copies of Rubens’s painting: one in the Musée de Picardie, Amiens (gift of Baron de Fourment in 1878); a second in the collection of G. Kasper-Ansermet, Peymeinade-Grasse, France, as of 1954; and a third, a reduced-scale panel in the collection of J. Pinget, Geneva, as of 1968.

Notes: Sir Peter Paul Rubens's Lot and his Daughters is a magisterial masterpiece by the greatest artist of the Northern Baroque. Beautifully preserved and painted with striking bravura, it has long been known about but little seen. It was first discussed in print at least as early as 1766, when Thomas Martyn saw it in the Marlborough collection at Blenheim Palace and included it in the first volume of The English Connoisseur. Prior to that it had graced the collections of European royalty and important Antwerp merchants. Since the 19th century, it has been listed in all the major catalogues of Rubens’s paintings, yet it has been hidden from public view for over a century. Known until now only from a black and white photograph, its reappearance establishes it as one of the grandest and most important private commissions of Rubens’s early maturity and one of the greatest paintings by the master to have remained in private hands.

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Self Portrait, 1638-40 © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria / Bridgeman Images

Rubens circa 1614: A genius at work

At the time that Rubens painted Lot and his Daughters, around 1613–1614, he was already the most important and fashionable artist in Antwerp, steadily establishing the reputation that would put him at the centre of the European artistic stage.

Following eight years in Italy, where he had worked principally in Rome and at the court of Vincenzo I Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, Rubens returned to his native Flanders in October 1608, upon the death of his mother. The conditions in Antwerp were ideal for creating exciting opportunities for the promising young artist: the start of the Twelve Years’ Truce with Spain (1609–1621) ushered in a prolonged period of political stability and economic prosperity, the likes of which the region had not experienced for half a century; churches, many of which were badly damaged during the iconoclastic outbursts of the previous decades, were in need of new decoration, and the rise of a wealthy class of patrician merchants offered good prospects for important and lucrative commissions. In 1609, Rubens was given the singular honour of being appointed court painter in Brussels to the enlightened Archdukes Albert and Isabella, while being granted the privilege to remain in Antwerp and carry out commissions for other patrons. Confident in his own abilities, Rubens’s rise to prominence was as swift as it was unchallenged, and the decade following his Italian sojourn was marked by the production of an uninterrupted string of seminal masterpieces.

These were to include his two monumental altarpieces, The Raising of the Cross, commissioned in 1610 for the church of St Walburga, and its spiritual pendant The Descent from the Cross, painted in 1611–1614 for Antwerp Cathedral. In addition, Rubens carried out private commissions, imbuing traditional religious subjects with an exciting new energy. The artist attracted and befriended a plethora of enthusiastic Antwerp patrons, such as the city’s burgomeister Nicolaas Rockox, the spice merchant Cornelis van der Geest, and the printmaker Balthasar Moretus, whose deep erudition and humanist interests the painter shared. For such patrons, he produced two of the outstanding panels of the period, which combined in a completely unprecedented manner the aesthetic with the intellectual and the sensual with the dramatic: the rich and vibrant Samson and Delilah of circa 1609–1610 commissioned by Nicolaas Rockox (fig. 1; London, National Gallery), and the highly charged Massacre of the Innocents from circa 1611–1612, the original owner of which remains unknown (fig. 2; Toronto, The Thomson Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario) (sold, Sotheby’s, London, 10 July 2002, £49,506,648). In terms of ambition, brilliance of execution and sensual appeal, Lot and his Daughters sits comfortably alongside these two contemporaneous works. Together these three pictures encapsulate the inventiveness and selfassurance of an artist who, fired up by his time in Italy, was operating at the height of his powers. As David Jaffé noted, by this time ‘Rubens had become an epic painter. He understood the power of the stories he told, and his paintings still have the power to stop us in our tracks.’ (D. Jaffé, Rubens: A Master in the Making, London, 2005, p. 165).

Fig. 1 Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Samson and Delilah, c. 1609–1610 © National Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images

Fig. 2 Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1611–1612. The Thomson Collection© Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Between Vice and Virtue: The story of Lot and his Daughters

The story of Lot and his Daughters is recounted in the Old Testament, Genesis XIX: 30–38. Urged by two angels to flee the immoral city of Sodom before its imminent destruction, Lot and his family left their home. However, Lot’s wife disregarded the angels' command to not look back upon Sodom’s burning ruins and was thus transformed into a pillar of salt for her disobedience. Lot escaped to the desolate mountain town of Zoar with his two chaste daughters who, fearing that following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah they would remain on earth without the hope of progeny, conspired to make their father drunk and trick him into impregnating them:

“And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters. And the firstborn said unto the younger: ‘Our father is old, and there is not a man on earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father’. And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger: ‘Behold, I lay yesternight with my father. Let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father’. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.” — Genesis XIX: 30–36, The King James Bible.

The older daughter conceived Moab (‘from the father’ in Hebrew), father of the Moabites, while the younger conceived Ben-Ammi (‘son of my people’), father of the Ammonites tribe. According to the Bible, Jesus Christ was directly descended from Lot through David’s great-grandmother Ruth, who was descended from Moab.

The moral ambivalence of the story of Lot and his Daughters has long engendered passionate debate among biblical scholars. As Anne Lowenthal noted, ‘even the earliest commentators were sensitive to the complexities of Lot’s character’ (A. Lowenthal, ‘Lot and his Daughters as Moral Dilemma’, Age of Rembrandt: Studies in Seventeenth- Century Dutch Painting, R.E. Fleischer, S. Scott Munshower (eds.), Pennsylvania, 1988, p. 14). Genesis twice implies that Lot was so intoxicated that he did not know what was happening to him, which enabled commentators to find him guilty of drunkenness rather than incest. In La Vie Dévote, St François de Sales invoked the story as evidence that it is possible to secure forgiveness for sins if, as was the case with Lot, they were not habitual (St François de Sales,Introduction à la vie dévote, Lyon, 1609).

As for his daughters, they were more commonly viewed as being driven by a commendable wish to perpetuate the race, when they believed that all men had perished, rather than lust. ‘Within the framework of Old Testament morality,’ Lowenthal observes, ‘such incest was less reprehensible than childlessness’ (Lowenthal, op. cit., p. 14). Profoundly complex, the subject was nonetheless interpreted as a warning against the dangers of succumbing to the temptations and trickery of women, and was just one of a number of often recited tales illustrating their subversive power: indeed, only a few years before producing this picture, Rubens had painted the story of the Biblical hero Samson undone by the scheming seductress Delilah. Of equal or perhaps greater interest to the artist and his patrons was the fact that these moralising stories provided legitimate opportunities to depict erotic subjects and the female nude, and the abundance of paintings showing Lot and his Daughters in Flanders and Northern art in the early years of the 17th century suggests that patrons responded to this cautionary theme, in all its ambiguity and inherent sensuality.

The subject was also rooted in a long-standing visual tradition in the North, going back to the Renaissance. Lucas van Leyden made a famous and influential engraving of Lot and his Daughters in 1530 (fig. 3), and Philips Galle took up the theme in a more lascivious print of 1558. The most prestigious painted depiction of the subject made in Flanders in the generation preceding that of Rubens was the famous panel by Jan Massys from 1565 (Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique). Rubens’s contemporaries undertook well-known depictions of the story at almost the same moment that he did, including three versions by Joachim Wtewael (all made around 1600: the finest version is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; fig. 4), whose frivolous Mannerist style contrasts with Rubens’s dramatic treatment of the theme. Exemplifying a naturalistic tradition that anticipated the Dutch Golden Age, Hendrick Goltzius – who Rubens had just visited in Haarlem when he embarked on painting Lot and his Daughters – also produced an impressive painting on the theme in 1616 (fig. 5; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum).

Fig. 4 Joachim Wtewael (1566–1638), Lot and his Daughters, c. 1595. LACMA, Los Angeles© Museum Associates/LACMA.

Fig. 5 Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), Lot and his Daughters, 1616 © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

It is against the background of this rich Northern tradition that Rubens turned, on several occasions, to the complexities of Lot’s tale. Focusing on the episode that precipitated the dramatic events depicted in the present work, the artist painted The Departure of Lot and his Family from Sodom in a large canvas made around 1613–1615 (fig. 6; Sarasota, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art) and again, some years later in 1625, in a smaller painting on panel (Paris, Musée du Louvre). In addition, some four years before he painted the present work, the artist produced another depiction of Lot and his Daughters for an unknown patron. The picture, which has long been in the collection of the Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, has never been the object of particular acclaim. However, an engraving of it, published in 1612 by Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg (fig. 7), proved quite popular and might have prompted an as-yet unidentified patron to commission a second version of the subject – much grander in scale – the result of which is the picture presented here.

Fig. 6 Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Departure of Lot and his Family from Sodom, c. 1613-1615, 86¾ x 96 in., SN218 © Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, The State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University

Fig. 7 Willem Isaacsz van Swanenburg (1580–1674), after Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Lot and His Daughters, 1612, engraving © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

It is a mark of Rubens’s genius that he employed quite different approaches in his two depictions of Lot and his Daughters. In the earlier Schwerin composition of around 1610, Lot is a garrulous drunk and not the passive victim of his daughters’ calculated actions as described in Genesis. He paws at one of the girls, pulling her blouse off her shoulder while eyeing her lustily, fully engaged in the seduction taking place. When returning to the subject several years later, probably around 1614, Rubens entirely reconceived it. Whereas a note of ribald vulgarity suffuses the Schwerin painting, the present composition is more psychologically complex. Lot is obviously very drunk: his eyes glazed and his complexion reddened by wine, he slumps on the floor of the cave, hardly able to grasp the cup that his daughter offers him. A purplish-grey, fur-trimmed damask robe provides his only cover, shielding his lap. Bald and bearded, he rests one hand on a rock to steady himself. Elderly but strong and massively built, Lot is nonetheless powerless in the hands of his determined daughters: his evident physical strength is no match for their wiles, much as the young Jewish hero of Rubens’s Samson and Delilah sprawls helplessly asleep across the lap of his beguiling lover, as he is bound, shorn and blinded by the Philistines.

Lot’s two daughters kneel beside him, one wearing a low-cut blue dress, stroking the old man’s neck as she encourages him to drink, her expression self-aware and even somewhat triumphant. Her sister, embarrassingly exposed in her nudity, focuses intently but nervously on the task at hand as she pours the wine, but seems preoccupied and emotionally strained at the thought of what will follow. The nuances of the three protagonists’ states of mind, conveyed as much through their poses as their delicately calibrated facial expressions, are masterly examples of the painter’s skill.

Rubens’s sources: Italy, Michelangelo and the Antique

Joost Vander Auwera observed that, ‘In many art-historical surveys, Rubens is considered the quintessential painter – the one who possessed the intellectual and artistic potential needed to unite diverse visual traditions in a surprising new synthesis’ (J. Vander Auwera, Rubens: A Genius at Work, Brussels, 2007, p. 66). Nowhere is this more manifest than in the dexterity and intelligence with which Rubens manipulated and incorporated into his paintings a vast corpus of sources, ranging from the ancient world and the Renaissance to the work of his Baroque contemporaries. This quality was recognised and celebrated as early as 1678, when the artist and writer Samuel van Hoogstraten compared Rubens’s working method and inspiration to the behaviour of a virtuous bee who, as described by Seneca, ‘imbibes from several of the most beautiful flowers in order to incorporate their nectar into its own honey’ (S. van Hoogstraten, cited in ibid., p. 70, note 1). Deploying a wide array of visual quotations in a powerful new composition,Lot and his Daughters is in this respect an archetypal work by the artist.

When Rubens arrived in Rome in 1601, Caravaggio was the leading artist in the city and his influence on the Flemish artist proved to be profound and lasting. In this picture, the dramatic, tenebrous lighting effects, the warm, saturated tones and the theatrically hung crimson drapery, as well as Lot’s rough and dirty feet, together constitute a clear tribute to Caravaggio.

Besides absorbing the influence of his contemporaries, Rubens’s most sustained activity during his years in Rome consisted of the copying of antique statuary. ‘In order to attain the highest perfection in painting,’ the artist wrote in a theoretical essay, De Imitatione Statuarum (1608–1610), ‘it is necessary to understand the antiques, nay, to be so thoroughly possessed of this knowledge that it may diffuse itself everywhere’(A. Aymonino, A. Varick Lauder (eds.),Drawn from the Antique, London, 2015, p. 71). In Lot and his Daughters, each figure is meticulously studied and modelled, sculptural in its monumentality yet human in its fleshy vulnerability. As Rubens himself put it, he aspired to bring the monumental quality of marble to his painted figures, yet he strived to ensure they did not ‘smell of stone’ (Rubens, cited in loc. cit.) This perceived danger was clearly averted in Lot and his Daughters where every inch of Rubens’s canvas pulsates with life.

Rubens’s portrayal of the biblical patriarch was probably inspired by a lost and unidentified Hellenistic statue of aReclining Hercules (?), which he had copied earlier in Italy in a drawing that he retained in his study collection (fig. 8; Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana). It is likely that Michelangelo also knew this ancient sculpture: echoes of it are to be found in the recumbent figures that he carved for the Medici tombs in Florence, which Rubens had copied in a drawing now in the Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia in Paris. Michelangelo's work had a great impact on Rubens and the Italian artist was probably the most direct source for the figure of Lot. Rubens daringly lent the intoxicated old man the languorous pose of Michelangelo’s dreaming young Leda in a lost painting depicting Leda and the Swan, the famous episode in Zeus’s amorous adventures where the king of the gods turns into a swan to seduce the beautiful wife of King Tyndareus. Rubens probably knew Michelangelo’s painting from its famous engraving by Jacob Bos (fig. 9) and had already copied it – the resulting painting is now in Dresden. He would have pleased his learned patrons by referencing this prestigious Renaissance source, and in so doing he equated Lot, vulnerable to his daughters’ advances, with the mythological victim of Zeus’s lust.

Fig. 8 Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Two Studies of a Reclining Hercules(?); Bust of a River God, black chalk on paper. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, F. 249 inf., fol. 9 © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana – Milano/De Agostini Picture Library

Fig. 9 Jacob Bos (c. 1520-after 1580) after Michelangelo (1475–1564), Leda and the Swan, 1544–1566, engraving © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris/Bridgeman Images

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Lot and his Daughters (detail), c. 1613–1614

An additional source may be found for the figure of Lot that underlines his moral ambivalence. A further testimony to Rubens’s profound engagement with antique prototypes, Lot’s face is closely related to that of a famous inebriated figure, The Drunken Silenus Leaning Against a Tree Trunk. Rubens copied the subject from a well-known sculpture that was in the Chigi collection during his stay in Rome and which is now in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden (fig. 10); his drawn copy is now in the British Museum in London (fig. 11). At once a licentious drunk (Silenus) and a hapless victim (Leda), Rubens’s figure of Lot is a triumph of psychological complexity.

Fig. 10 The Drunken Silenus Leaning against a Tree Trunk, Roman copy after an original from c. 330 B.C., marble. Inv. no. 316© Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden 2016

Fig. 11 Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), The Drunken Silenus Leaning Against a Tree Trunk (detail), c. 1600–1608, black chalk on paper © The Trustees of the British Museum, London

Although Rubens produced fine life studies of the male nude in specially devised poses for many of his paintings, the social and professional decorum of the time meant that no such studies of the female nude could be made in the studio. The artist would again have relied on his knowledge of antique statuary, and, indeed, for the tensed pose of Lot’s nude daughter, Rubens seems to have turned to the famous Crouching Venus. This 2nd-century A.D. Roman marble existed in multiple copies, including a version that was displayed in the Palazzo Madama in Rome during Rubens’s years in the Eternal City. He would also have had unlimited opportunities to study another version of theCrouching Venus that was in the Gonzaga collection during his years in Mantua (later sold to Charles I and today in the Royal Collection, on loan to the British Museum; for an 18th-century copy of it, see fig. 12). This celebrated sculpture was a favourite of artists in Rome and already in the 16th century her complex pose had captured the imagination of Northern painters such as Maarten van Heemskerck. Although the Crouching Venus is a traditional image of modesty – caught bathing, the goddess curls in on herself to hide her nudity – Rubens was happy to transform it into an emblem of seduction. In fact, he would look to the same source as inspiration for female nudes in several other of his paintings of the period, including the small Susannah and the Elders of 1614 (Stockholm, Nationalmuseum), The Flight into Egypt, also of 1614, and Venus, Cupid, Bacchus and Ceres (the latter two works are now in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Kassel). Rubens also produced a drawing of The Penitent Magdalene, now in the British Museum, in which the saint casts a similar pose to the goddess (fig. 13).

Fig. 12 John Nost the Elder (active c. 1678-c. 1712), Crouching Venus, 1702, after an original, 2nd-century A.D. Roman marble, marble, Victoria and Albert Museum, London© Thomas Coulborn & Sons

Fig. 13 Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Penitent Magdalene, black chalk, heightened with white on paper © The Trustees of the British Museum, London.

For the clothed sister in Lot and his Daughters, the artist could rely on the study of an actual model. For her face he employed the same model that he had used for the beautiful and virtuous Virgin Mary in several of his religious paintings, notably The Virgin and Child in a Garland of Flowers, a collaboration with Jan Breughel the Elder (fig. 14; Munich, Alte Pinakothek). Through this erudite choice of visual sources, Rubens emphasises the ambiguity of the daughters’ moral stance, endowing them with both the purity of the Virgin and the seductive lure of Venus.

Fig. 14 Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Jan Breughel the Elder (1568–1625), The Virgin and Child in a Garland of Flowers, c. 1618–1620 © Alte Pinakothek, Munich/Bridgeman Images

Execution and technique

The fact that Lot and his Daughters, a work of significant dimensions, has survived in such good state allows for a vivid appreciation of Rubens’s technical virtuosity.

Rubens would no doubt have devised his composition in a small-scale oil modello, if not in an earlier rapid pen and ink sketch, though neither is known today. X-radiography (fig. 15) and infrared imaging examinations reveal a composition executed with breathtaking assurance and remarkably few hesitations or changes of mind. Only smallpentimenti, indicating little shifts and refinements in the composition as Rubens prepared it, are evident in the profile of the head of the nude daughter (fig. 16).

Fig. 15 X-radiograph of Rubens's Lot and his Daughters © Art Access & Research (UK Ltd.)

Fig. 16 Infra-red refectography of Rubens’s Lot and his Daughters (detail) © Art Access & Research (UK Ltd.)

The main twill weave canvas, with two weft threads to one warp thread, is a type common to large paintings of the 17th century. The way in which it was prepared, with a layer of chalk followed by a lead white priming, is also typical. Technical analysis has confirmed what is apparent to the naked eye, that narrow strips of horizontally running canvas were later added to the top and bottom edges of the original painting (about 7 1/8 in. and 4 in. wide respectively), enlarging the composition without any significant damage or loss to the original edges. These enlargements would certainly have been made after Rubens’s death, most likely around 1710–1720, when the very fine frame that is still on the picture would also have been made. The ornament of the frame is closely related to gilded furniture designed by the cabinetmaker James Moore, who took over the supervision of the furnishing of Blenheim after Sir John Vanbrugh resigned as architect in 1716. It was evidently made to fit in with the house’s interior design and furnishings. The painting retained this frame when many others were reframed as part of the remodelling and improvement of Blenheim’s interior by William Ince and John Mayhew in the 1770s.

Although the painting is discoloured by an old varnish, the paint surface, with its texture and subtle tonal gradations, is entirely legible. The rich yet elegant palette that Rubens employed in this painting is evident through the varnish, with the cooler hues – seen, for example, in Lot’s patterned drape – contrasting with the deep blues and reds of the daughter’s dress and the drapes in the background. The brilliantly modulated skin tones are brought into strong relief by powerful contrasts of light and shadow showcasing an artist in complete control of his medium. Passages of bold impasto are scattered over the remarkably intact paint surface and used to highlight key areas on the figures’ heads, perhaps most notably on the intricate plaited coiffure of the naked daughter. Rubens is equally adept in articulating form, when desired, with an extraordinary economy of means: thus the heavily impasted hair of the same daughter cascades sensuously down to below her right arm in lighter, more rapidly executed brushstrokes; a single wisp of hair falls in front of her ear and onto her cheek with just a few flecks of paint. Technical analysis has thrown light on a further aspect of the artist’s method of execution: Lot’s back and buttocks were first laid out in their entirety, with his back extended somewhat lower than it appears in the present work; the purple drapery of his robe was then added over the completed figure, after which the brown fur lining was painted in; the damask pattern was added last of all.

A condition report compiled by Simon Howell of Robert Shepherd Studios, and technical analysis (including X-ray and infra-red images) by Dr. Nicholas Eastaugh and Dr. Jilleen Nadolny of Art Access and Research, London, are available on request.

2-9

Lot 6. Pieter Brueghel II (Brussels c. 1564-1637/8 Antwerp), The Four Seasons: Spring; Summer; Autumn; and Winter; the first signed '·BREVGHEL·' (lower left); the second signed '·P·BREVGHEL·' (lower right); the third signed and dated 'P · BREVGHEL· 1624·' (lower left); and the fourth signed and dated '·P· BREVGHEL· 1624·' (lower right); oil on panel, 16 5/8 x 22 1/8 in. (42.3 x 57.1 cm.), (4) a set of four. Estimate £3,000,000 - £5,000,000 ($3,873,000 - $6,455,000). Price Realized £6,466,50 ($8,380,584) (€7,552,872). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Lot 6. Pieter Brueghel II (Brussels c. 1564-1637/8 Antwerp), The Four Seasons: Spring (details). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Lot 6. Pieter Brueghel II (Brussels c. 1564-1637/8 Antwerp), The Four Seasons: Summer (detail). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Lot 6. Pieter Brueghel II (Brussels c. 1564-1637/8 Antwerp), The Four Seasons: Winter (details). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Provenance: Private collection, France.
with Paul Mersch, Paris, 1927 (possibly on behalf of the de La Borderie family).
Anonymous sale [Sammlung des Herrn La Borderie und anderer Besitz]; Fischer, Lucerne, 19 July 1927, lots 14-17, where acquired by an ancestor of the present owner.

Literature: G. Marlier, J. Folie (ed.), Pierre Brueghel le Jeune, Brussels, 1969, pp. 218 (no. 7), 222 (no. 1), 228 (no. 4), 235 (no. 5) and 237 (no. 1).
R. Jotzu et al., Von Cranach bis Monet: Europäische Meisterwerke aus dem Nationalen Kunstmuseum Bukarest, exhibition catalogue, Museum Sinclair-Haus, Bad Homburg vor der Hohe and Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, 1993, p. 76.
K. Ertz, Pieter Brueghel der Jüngere (1564-1637/8): Die Gemälde, mit kritischem OEuvrekatalog, Lingen, 2000, II, pp. 543, 592, 596, 599 and 601, nos. E616, E639, E653, E667, as ‘eigenhandige, sehr gute Arbeiten’.

Notes: This wonderfully-observed evocation of the passage of time is one of the last complete sets of The Four Seasons by Pieter Brueghel the Younger in existence and is believed to have been in the same prestigious collection for nearly a century.

Writing in the 2000 edition of his Catalogue Raisonné on the artist, Dr. Klaus Ertz identified the set in the National Museum of Art of Romania, Bucharest, as the only remaining complete set of The Four Seasons by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (‘Von Pieter II gibt es nur noch eine komplette Vierer-Serie in Bukarester Museumsbesitz’, op. cit., p. 537). Dr. Ertz suggested that the scarcity of such complete sets could be explained by two reasons: first, that Pieter the Younger was willing to execute versions of individual seasons to meet the demand as and when it occurred; and, second, that any complete sets which had passed down in private hands had been broken up and sold individually.

The present set was known to Dr. Ertz only from black and white photographs dating from the 1927 sale; as late as 2000 he wrote that ‘no trace has been found’ (‘hat sich weder eine Spur gefunden’) of what he called the ‘Fischer-Zyklus’ (ibid., p. 543). Nevertheless, Dr. Ertz was convinced of their high quality, describing them as ‘eigenhändige, sehr gute Arbeiten’ (‘autograph, very good works’), in some respects better than the set in Bucharest. Dr. Ertz gives the present set a central place in his discussion of the development of the type, noting the importance of the date (while many of Pieter the Younger’s works are signed, relatively few are dated), which allows us to place the works very precisely within the chronology of the artist’s career. On the basis of the material available to him, Dr. Ertz was only aware that Winter was dated, and argued that the other three panels must belong to the same year, as he believes this to be a true set, conceived and executed as such. The presence of the same date on Autumn strengthens this argument. This is the first occasion in which this set has been illustrated in colour in any publication, and the first time that it has been publically exhibited since 1927.

The idea of creating four separate, stand-alone images to represent the Four Seasons was conceived by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), one of the greatest innovators in the history of art. His enterprising and successful publisher, Hieronymous Cock (1518-1570), whose publishing house ‘At the Four Winds’ was the most important and renowned in Northern Europe, commissioned designs for prints of the Four Seasons from Bruegel in circa 1564. Bruegel’s drawing for Spring, signed and dated 1565, is in the Albertina, Vienna; Summer, signed and dated 1568, is in the Kunsthalle, Hamburg (figs. 1 and 2). Bruegel’s untimely death in 1569 prevented his completion of the series, and the project was taken over by Hans Bol (1534-1593), another leading landscape artist of that time. Cock’s prints were finally published in 1570, and swiftly became widely known. Pieter the Younger, who was only a child when his father died, but who would champion his style and iconography in the next generation, was not the first artist to make paintings derived from Cock’s Four Seasons, but his delicate treatment of the designs is the closest in spirit to his father’s original vision.

Fig. 1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Spring, 1565, pen & ink on paper © Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, Austria / Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 2 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Summer, 1568, pen and ink on paper © Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany / Bridgeman Images

The iconography of The Four Seasons can be traced back to the calendar illustrations for medieval Books of Hours, such as the Limbourg Brothers’ celebrated Très Riches Heures illuminated for the Duc de Berry, circa 1411-1416. In these, Saints’ Days and other religious feasts are listed by month, and on the facing page an artist would paint a specific activity connected with that time of year. Depictions of the Twelve Months and the Seasons continued into the 16th and 17th centuries, their greatest exponents at this time became Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who established this genre as an independent category of painting, and his son, Pieter Breughel the Younger, whose paintings are conceived very much in the tradition of his father, but also represent an important transition between 16th and 17th-century Northern art.

Spring is depicted as a formal flower garden, presumably part of a noble estate. Marlier notes the expression of Italianate figural types of the High Renaissance in Pieter the Elder’s design, doubtless influenced by his trip to Italy – Charles de Tolnay had pointed out a debt to Michelangelo in the figure of the gardener at the right foreground, which echoes the pose of Noah in one of the panels of the Sistine Chapel ceiling (Marlier, op. cit., p. 219). Suggesting that the activities in the foreground belong to the month of March, Marlier argues that the formal layout of the garden is French in origin, ‘un jardin à la française, d’une ordonnance strictement géométrique ... parterres qu’on arrose, ratisse, égalise et où l’on plante des fleurs et des graines’, while those of the middle ground belong to April, and those in the background, to May. Spring is one of the seasons which seems to have been more frequently requested from Pieter the Younger as an individual painting, and a number have appeared on the market, most recently at Sotheby’s, New York, 6 June 2013, lot 29 ($2,285,000).

Summer is one of the most famous of all of Pieter the Elder’s compositions. In developing the drawing of 1568, Pieter the Elder modified the composition of his celebrated painting of 1565, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Like Spring, Summer is full of hidden references to the most rarefied Classical and Italian precedents, which belie its seemingly colloquial, bucolic subject matter. The splayed body of the resting figure in the foreground, steadying himself against the ground as he heaves a heavy jug of water up to drink, has been seen as a quotation of the contorted pose of the Laocoön, while the figure cutting wheat with a scythe recalls another figure by Michelangelo, this time fromThe Conversion of Saint Paul in the Pauline Chapel, Rome (ibid., p. 226). Despite the existence of a number of individual versions of this composition by Pieter the Younger, Summer only rarely appears on the market; the last version, on a larger scale (73 x 104 cm.) was sold in these Rooms, 3 July 2012, lot 41 (£2,393,250).

Autumn is one of the compositions invented by Hans Bol rather than Pieter the Elder, but the vernacular subject matter and everyday themes resonate eloquently with the earlier seasons, particularly Summer (fig. 3.). Pieter the Younger clarified the composition by reducing the number of figures, bringing the slaughtered pig into full view and allowing himself and his viewers to relish the details of the preparation of this staple part of the diet of 16th- and 17thcentury Northern Europeans. The group at the left foreground, which Bol presents from a different angle, is reprised by Pieter the Younger from one of the most celebrated compositions of Pieter the Elder, The Numbering at Bethlehem (Brussels, The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium). In both works, the pig slaughter is cast as an essential element in the struggle for survival, which is inherent to the human condition, as peasants work to carve and store the meat in time for the winter to come.

Fig. 3 Peter van der Heyden and Hieronymous Cock, after Hans Bol, Autumn, 1570, engraving © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Possibly one of Hans Bol’s most original compositions, the design for Winter nevertheless could not fail to transmit the influence of Pieter the Elder, for whom the winter landscape was perhaps his favourite domain (fig. 4). Celebrated works such as The Hunters in the Snow (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum), The Adoration of the Magi (believed to be the first ever depiction of snowfall in a painting – Winterthur, Reinhart Collection) or the Numbering at Bethlehemquickly became closely associated with Bruegel’s fame and reputation, and have remained some of the most iconic and recognisable images of Western art. The theme of ice skating, which Bol highlights in his Winter, had already been explored by Pieter the Elder in his Winter landscape with a bird trap (Brussels, Royal Museums), a subject that was taken up by his son, Pieter the Younger. The Bol/Brueghel Winter occupies a key place in the development of the subject, which would eventually entrain a whole school of artists, including Abel Grimmer, Hendrick Avercamp, Jan van Goyen, Jan Beerstraten and many others. Individual versions by Pieter the Younger are rare, and can command high prices when they appear on the market, most recently Sotheby’s, London, 8 July 2015, lot 6 (£1,085,000).

Fig. 4 Peter van der Heyden and Hieronymous Cock, after Hans Bol, Winter, 1570, engraving © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

A complete set of The Four Seasons by Pieter Brueghel the Younger may be recorded as early as the 18th century, in inventories of the paintings in the Schatzkammer, Vienna compiled by Johann Martin Rausch and other keepers of the collection, described as four small panels, ‘Les quatre Saisons’, by ‘alten Brügl’ or as copies (cited in Marlier and Folie,op. cit, p. 218). The present whereabouts of this possible complete set is unknown. At least two other complete sets are recorded in the 20th century: one set, formerly in the Mallet de Choisi collection, appeared on the market in 1935; and a second set appeared on the market in 1972. Ertz assumed that both sets may have been broken up since their respective sales (op. cit., pp. 542-543), and no complete set has been offered at auction since 1972.

The paintings offered at auction by Galerie Fischer, Lucerne, on 19 July 1927, which included the present set of The Four Seasons, were described as coming primarily from the collection of the ‘Herrn de La Borderie’. The Sieurs (or Lords) de La Borderie, one of the most ancient noble families in France, including the important 16th-century poet, Jean Boiceau, Sieur de La Borderie (1513-1591), who is celebrated for writing in poitevinsaintongeais, a regional dialect of French; he is believed to have sheltered John Calvin and may have been one of the first French converts to Calvinism. His descendant, Arthur Le Moyne de La Borderie (1827-1901), was one of the outstanding French historians of the 19th century.

Monochrome photographs in the files of the Netherlands Institute for Art History, the RKD, The Hague, depicting works from the present set, are inscribed on the reverse ‘Mersch / 1927’ in the hand of the renowned expert Max J. Friedländer (image nos. 107094-5), who provided expertise for the 1927 Fischer sale. This inscription indicates that the works were shown to Friedländer by the Paris-based dealer and collector Dr. Paul Mersch in 1927, but given the proximity of this date to the Fischer sale, it is likely that he was acting as agent for the consignors to the Fischer auction, possibly the de La Borderie family. Both Marlier and Ertz accept the La Borderie provenance.

Lot 41. Bernardo Bellotto (Venice 1721-1780 Warsaw), Venice: The Entrance to the Grand Canal; and The Grand Canal from the Ca' da Mosto to the Fabbriche Nuove, with the Rialto Bridge; oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 36 3/8 in. (61.2 x 92.4 cm.), (2) a pair. Estimate £2,000,000 - £3,000,000 ($2,582,000 - $3,873,000). Price Realized £3,554,500 ($4,606,632) (€4,151,656). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Lot 41. Bernardo Bellotto (Venice 1721-1780 Warsaw), Venice: The Entrance to the Grand Canal; and The Grand Canal from the Ca' da Mosto to the Fabbriche Nuove, with the Rialto Bridge, details. Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Provenance: (Possibly) Stratford Canning, 1st Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe (1786-1880); Christie’s, London, 29 June 1878, lots 42 (‘THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE, with the church of Sta. Maria della Salute’) and 43 (‘THE RIALTO—the Companion), as ‘Canaletto’ (100 and 80 gns. respectively to Baen).
Acquired circa 1880 by the great-great grandfather of the present owners.

Property of a Family Trust.

Notes: This distinguished pair of Venetian views by the youthful Bernardo Bellotto has, rather remarkably, not been mentioned in the extensive literature on the artist and his mentor, his uncle Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto. Although based on compositions by the latter these works demonstrate the precocious brilliance of Bellotto, who was only nineteen at the time they were painted in about 1740.

As both pictures and indeed the other Venetian views painted in his later teens demonstrate, Bellotto’s experience of reworking views devised by his uncle was central both to the evolution of his personal working methods and to the definition of his own artistic personality. The celebrated views of Lombardy and later of Dresden, Vienna and Warsaw developed as a direct result of what Bellotto had absorbed when interpreting compositions evolved by his uncle: in his response to these one immediately senses the bravura of his technique and his dramatic brilliance as a vedutista. The Entrance to the Grand Canal shows, from the left, the Dogana, Longhena’s great church of Santa Maria della Salute, the medieval church of San Gregorio with the monastic buildings beside the canal, its façade seen from the back, a sequence of palaces with the now demolished tower of the Palazzo Venier delle Torreselle, and, in the distance, the campanile of Santa Maria della Carità: opposite, on the right, is the Palazzo Badoer Tiepolo, to the left of which is a campanile. The companion view, taken from close to the north side of the Grand Canal, shows from the left the Ca’ da Mosto, then the Albergo del Leon Bianco where so many distinguished visitors stayed, and the adjacent Palazzo Dolfin, both medieval (an extra arch is added on the first floor of the latter), and after a sequence of lower buildings the recently-built Palazzo Civran, designed by Antonio Massari, the predecessor of the Palazzo Ruzzini, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi and the building beside the Rialto Bridge, designed like this in 1588 by Antonio da Ponte, with behind the former the campanile of San Bartolomeo al Rialto: to the right of the bridge are three major 16th-century buildings, the end of Antonio dei Grigi’s Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, its lateral façade caught in sunlight, the Fabbriche Vecchie di Rialto and five bays of the Fabbriche Nuove.

From a remarkably early age, Bellotto reworked compositions devised by Canaletto to singular effect, developing a technique that was looser and therefore less time-consuming than his uncle’s, and evolving a rich tonal palette that is readily distinguishable from the latter’s. The small group of Venetian views accepted as by Bellotto in Stefan Kozakiewicz’s monograph of 1972 has been significantly augmented more recently by Charles Beddington, Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, and others.

The Entrance to the Grand Canal perfectly exemplifies Bellotto’s method. The composition was based on the refined picture by Canaletto, which was bought by Consul Smith (Windsor, Royal Collection; W.G. Constable, J. Links ed.,Canaletto, Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697-1768, Oxford, 1989, no. 161), and was engraved with exacting precision by Antonio Visentini in 1735 (fig. 1; Prospectus Magni Canalis Venetiarum, VI). As usual Bellotto’s canvas is rather larger than that of his uncle’s, which measures 47.6 by 78.7 cm. The architectural detail follows Canaletto’s very closely, as does the general arrangement of the boats. However, the detail of these is changed in numerous respects: on the extreme left Bellotto brought forward the stern of the gondola and eliminated two boats that were in front of it; the oars of the sandalo are shown in various positions and thus not aligned as in the prototype; the clothes of the gondolier in the central vessel, like those of many of the other figures, is altered; the gondola to the right of this is reduced in length, and the boat behind this is much closer to it; and Bellotto introduces the stern of an extra gondola on the right, as if to answer that opposite, presumably because the companion composition was ‘framed’ in this way. Bellotto’s reflections on the water are notably more dramatic than those in his uncle’s picture; and the luminous light clouds too are his, overlying the diagonally laid in ground that is so characteristic of his early work.

Fig. 1 Antonio Visentini, after Antonio Canal, called Il Canaletto, Prospectus Magni Canalis Venetiarum, VI, engraving. Private Collection © Christie’s Images Limited 2016

The present picture is clearly more mature than another treatment of the subject, also based on the Windsor composition, obtained by James Harris in 1743, which Bozena Anna Kowalczyk dates to 1738 (Canaletto e Bellotto, L’arte della veduta, exhibition catalogue, Turin, Palazzo Bricherasio, 2008, pp. 58-9, no. 2): this in such details as the striped awning on the sandolo adheres more closely to Canaletto’s prototype. The more sophisticated picture under discussion can be more plausibly assigned to the period 1739-40.

The view of The Grand Canal from the Ca’ da Mosto, which is evidently of the same period, was also evolved from a prototype by Canaletto. The picture in question, one of a set of four painted in about 1737 for Charles Powlett, 3rd Duke of Bolton, was sold by his descendant at Christie’s, London, 27 June 1975, lot 6 (fig. 2; Constable, no. 240*). It measures 58.4 by 92.7 cm. and is thus very similar in scale to Bellotto’s rendition. Bellotto adhered not only to the architecture of the original but to the general pattern of the boats, although Bellotto rather characteristically enlarged some of these, most obviously the central gondola and that diagonally behind it. Equally characteristic of Bellotto is the enhanced drama of his reflections, most obviously that cast by the shaded façade of the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi almost at the centre of the composition. Bellotto evidently worked from the characteristically schematic outline drawing at Darmstadt (Hessisches Landesmuseum, inv. no. AE 2187; S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, London, 1972, II, p. 437, no. Z 202; M. Bleyd, Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto, Darmstadt, 1981, no. 4, dated 1735-8). A further picture first attributed to Bellotto as early as 1907, formerly in the Rudolf Kann and Henry P. Oppenheimer collections, sold at Christie’s, London, 21 June 1968, lot 87 and subsequently at Christie’s, New York, 15 June 1977, lot 92, corresponds very closely with that under discussion: the measurements are recorded as 58.4 by 92.7 cm. (Constable, no. 240 (c), as ‘improbably by Bellotto’; Kozakiewicz, no. 16, as Bellotto; B.A. Kowalczyk, Bernardo Bellotto, 1722-1780, exhibition catalogue, Houston, MFA, 2001, pp. 92-3, no. 16; C. Beddington, ‘Bernardo Bellotto and his circle in Italy. Part I: not Canaletto but Bellotto’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLVI, October 2004, pp. 666-7, fig. 16).

Fig. 2 Canaletto, View of the Grand Canal from the Ca’ da Mosto. Private Collection© Christie’s Images Limited 2016

Canaletto himself was averse to repetition. So it is perhaps instructive to consider why Bellotto chose to use the composition of the Bolton picture, rather than the smaller canvas from the Marlborough series (New York, Mrs Charles Wrightsman; Constable, no. 240). The latter is taken from a position somewhat to the left, with the result that the Cà da Mosto is seen in very deep recession, and the Fabbriche Nuove are seen from further away and thus do not balance the palaces opposite so easily. Bellotto, who doubtless knew how important pairs of pictures were to the decorative schemes of contemporary patrons, clearly understood that the Marlborough composition—devised for one of a series of twenty-one canvasses—would have worked less well as a pendant to the Entrance to the Grand Canal than that of the Bolton picture.

While the identification of these pictures as the two sold by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe cannot be proved, no other view of the Grand Canal with the Salute would seem to have been paired with one showing the Rialto. Moreover, the collection of the family who acquired the present two pictures was largely formed at the period in question. Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, who was substantially responsible for Britain’s policy towards the Ottoman Empire for much of the mid-19th century, was not primarily interested in pictures and did not own a substantial collection.

Lot 19. Jacob van Ruisdael (Haarlem 1628/9-1682 Amsterdam), View of Haarlem, signed 'JvRuisdael' ('JvR' linked, lower left), oil on canvas, 16 7/8 x 16 3/8 in. (42.9 x 41.3 cm.), in an early 19th Century composition frame, with inventory number '155'. Estimate £300,000 - £500,000 ($387,300 - $645,500). Price Realized £1,538,500 ($1,993,896) (€1,796,968). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Provenance: Sir A. Aston, Aston Hall, Aston-by-Sutton, Cheshire.
James Marshall Brooks (1822-1905), Portal Tarporley, Cheshire; Christie’s, London, 20 June 1891, lot 90, as ‘Ruysdael [sic.] and Van de Velde’ (750 gns.), where acquired by the following,
with Agnew’s, London, 1891, from whom acquired on 22 June (787 gns.) by the following,
Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, K.P., G.C.V.O., F.R.S. (1847-1927), and by descent.

Property of Descendants of the 1st Earl of Iveagh

Literature: J. Bryant, Kenwood: Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest, New Haven and London, 2003, Annex 1, p. 419.

Notes: In the same distinguished collection since 1891, this spectacular Haarlempje, has somehow managed to escape the attention of all the principal chroniclers of Jacob van Ruisdael’s paintings over the years, from Hofstede de Groote and Jakob Rosenberg to Seymour Slive. It now joins an important group of just four known upright panoramas of Ruisdael’s native city, all painted in the 1670s, that together constitute what Seymour Slive regarded as ‘the summit of his [Ruisdael’s] achievement’ in this area (S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 51).

With one or two exceptions, Ruisdael only began to paint these views of Haarlem in the 1660s, after he had settled in Amsterdam, invariably depicting the city from afar, basing his compositions on drawings made in the field, a few of which have survived. Slive lists sixteen such views (excluding those of Alkmaar, several of which have been confused in the past with Haarlem), of which only the four works referred to above (all on canvas and of similar dimensions) are on an upright format: Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (fig 1); London, Mansion House, Harold Samuel Collection (fig. 2); Zurich, Kunsthaus, Stiftung Prof. Dr. L. Ruzicka (fig. 3); and private collection, Scotland (ibid.). The present view relates most closely to the Samuel picture, showing the city from the West from the dunes at Overveen with Haarlem’s distinctive profile and the cathedral of St. Bavo breaking the skyline in the centre. The elevated viewpoint is slightly further removed in the Iveagh painting allowing for a more detailed rendition of the foreground, which shows two carriages, sportsmen and travellers on a sandy track leading in and out of the city. At the time of its sale in 1891, as is still the case now, the figurative element was presumed to be by Adriaen van de Velde (1636-1672) who was frequently employed by Ruisdael and other landscape artists, such as Meindert Hobbema and Jan Wijnants, to supply the staffage. His part in these collaborative efforts is thought to have demonstrably increased their market value at the time.

Fig. 1 Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem. Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht© Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Fig. 2 Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem © Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London / Harold Samuel Collection / Bridgeman Images.

Fig. 3 Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Haarlem © Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland / Bridgeman Images

The Iveagh picture is testament to Ruisdael’s chief contribution to the tradition of the panoramic landscape, which was to convert the horizontal format developed by the likes of Cornelis Vroom, Jan van Goyen and Philips Koninck, to an upright format. Rather than constrict the effect of sweeping landscape, Ruisdael managed to achieve the opposite with his dazzling technical bravura and profound understanding of lighting and spatial effects. Two thirds of the composition are here devoted to the sky and a sublime rendition of the interplay of light and clouds. The resulting passages of alternating light and shadow in the landscape create an effortless sense of movement and recession that lend the painting, as Peter Sutton has remarked of the Samuel picture ‘a grandeur that belies its diminutive scale’ (P. Sutton, The Harold Samuel Collection, London, 1992, p. 173, under cat. no. 59).

Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh (1847-1927) was the great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, the founder in 1759 of the celebrated brewery in Dublin. Hugely successful in business, he began to collect pictures on a grand scale in 1887, and was for several years Agnew’s most significant client. A major Cuyp was one of his first two purchases from the firm, and although English portraits were to dominate his London mansion in Grosvenor Place, Guinness evidently had a deep appreciation of pictures of the Dutch 17th century. This can still be experienced at Kenwood, the remarkable house enlarged by Robert Adam which he bequeathed to the nation with a substantial portion of his collection. This included the celebrated self-portrait by Rembrandt and Vermeer’s Lady playing a Guitar, both masterpieces of the highest order, and major works by Hals, Cuyp, Isaak van Ostade and Claude de Jongh. Guinness paid £826 17s. 6d. for this picture, the more expensive of the two Ruisdaels he bought, on June 22nd 1891, giving his dealer a small profit on the amount it fetched at Christie’s just two days earlier. Agnew’s account book reveals that they often acted on their client’s behalf at Christie’s and at least eleven pictures now at Kenwood were bought in the same manner. The Ruisdael price can be compared with the 1,000 guineas (£1,050) that the Vermeer cost two years earlier.

Preceding the Old Master and British Painting Evening Sale, The Exceptional Sale totalled £5,681,250/ $7,362,900/ €6,635700 achieving sell through rates of 89% by value and 80% by lot.

A world record was set for English Pottery with the sale of a Wedgwood black ‘First Day’s Vase of £482,500 / $625,320 / €563,560, more than double its high estimate.

Robert Copley, Deputy Chairman of Group, International Head of Furniture, Deputy Chairman, Christie’s UK “The Exceptional Sale saw international participation from registered bidders in 15 countries across 3 continents. The highlight of the sale was a Wedgwood black ‘First Day’s Vase’, one of only four day vases to have been thrown by Wedgwood himself, and one which has passed through generations of the Wedgwood family before being auctioned at Christie’s where it achieved a world record price for English pottery of £482,500 / $625,320 / €563,560, more than double its high estimate with spirited bidding in the room. Launched in 2008, the first concept sale of masterpieces, it presents the best of European decorative arts, many with celebrated provenance; all united by the common attribute of excellence, which this year realised sell through rates of 80% by lot and 89% by value with A world record was also set for a work by the Komai studio, a pair of Japanese inlaid iron vases and covers, which sold over estimate for £302,500 / $392,040 / €353,320. The top lots of the evening were a Meissen white model of a great bustard, which originated from Augustus the Strong’s porcelain menagerie and a pair of ice pails, ordered by Catherine the Great of Russia, the most elaborate and expensive set ever produced by Sèvres, both of which made £842,500 / $1,087,668 / €984,040".

Lot 320. A Wedgwood black ‘First Day’s Vase, 1769. Estimate £120,000 - £180,000 ($155,520 - $233,280). Price Realized £482,500 ($625,320) (€563,560). WORLD RECORD FOR ENGLISH POTTERY. Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

weg6

weg8

Lot 320. A Wedgwood black ‘First Day’s Vase, 1769, details. Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Oviform with curved upright loop handles, decorated in orange-red encaustic enamel with three classical figures above a titled frieze inscribed Artes Etruriae and renascuntur., the other side inscribed in encaustic enamel JUNE XIII .MDCC.LXIX./One of the first Days Productions/at/Etruria in Staffordshire,/by/Wedgwood and Bentley., above a band of palmettes, the neck moulded with bosses and decorated with a band of grass, the cover with a band of anthemion around a knop finial (finial cracked and restuck, minute chipping to rims); 10 in. (25.4 cm.) high

Provenance: Josiah Wedgwood I (1730-1795),
Josiah Wedgwood II (1769-1843),
Francis Wedgwood (1800-1888),
Godfrey Wedgwood (1833-1905),
Cecil Wedgwod (1863-1916),
Doris Audrey Wedgwood (1894-1968) who married Thomas Geoffrey Rowland Makeig-Jones (m.1928)
Anne Makeig-Jones (b.1934)

Applied with four 19th century labels inscribed in ink: ‘G. Wedgwood, No.1’; ‘Part of Plate 129, Vol. 1 of Hamilton’s Antiquities/Hercules & his companions/in the garden of the Hesperides’; and two labels which bear numerals ‘76’ and‘268/17’.

Literature: Robin Reilly, Wedgwood, London, 1989, Vol. I, p. 71, pl. 50 & p. 414, fig. 574.

Exhibited: On loan to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire 1979 – 2016.

Notes: The opening of the new Etruria factory was celebrated on 13 June 1769 when Josiah Wedgwood threw six ‘First Day’s Vases’ with the help of his partner Thomas Bentley who turned the potters’ wheel. Shortly after, the six vases were delivered to Bentley’s decorating workshop in Chelsea, where Wedgwood warned ‘The six Etruscan Vases, three handled sent to you a fortnight since were those we threw & turn’d the first at Etruria and sho’d be finish’d as high as you please but not sold, they being the first fruits of Etruria’.1 Fanning the flames of a growing obsession with the classical world, Wedgwood was quick to take advantage of the commercial possibilities of producing wares in the fashionable ‘Antique’ style. The shape of the First Day’s Vase was copied directly from an ancient vase in the collection of Sir William Hamilton and the classical red-figure decoration was taken from a plate in the first Volume of Hamilton’s catalogue, depicting Hercules in the Garden of Hesperides. Only four of the vases survived the firing process and of these two are in the Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent and a fourth is in a private collection. Excitingly, the present First Day’s Vase has passed through generations of the Wedgwood family and is now offered for sale from the collection of the granddaughter of Cecil Wedgwood. Each of the four surviving documentary vases proudly proclaim: Artes Etrurae Renascuntur, the Arts of Etruria are Reborn and they celebrate the beginning of one of the most important entrepreneurial and creative partnerships in the history of British art and manufacturing.

Josiah Wedgwood (oil on canvas), Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) / Down House, Downe, Kent, UK. © Historic England/Bridgeman Images.

Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95) is arguably the most revered of British potters. Coming from a large family of well-established potters in Staffordshire, he was the youngest child of Thomas and Mary Wedgwood of the Churchyard pottery in Burslem. Although his upbringing was modest, he was well-connected to important figures in the pottery industry. This included his cousins Thomas and John Wedgwood of the Big House who were successful manufacturers of saltglaze stoneware. Following the death of his father, Josiah Wedgwood was apprenticed to his older brother Thomas where he was contracted ‘to learn…the said Art of Throwing and Handleing’.2 Throwing was acknowledged as one of the most esteemed of a potter’s skills and only those who were to become master potters were allowed apprenticeships to develop these coveted skills. Josiah Wedgwood proved an ambitious and successful young man, moving to take advantage of several new partnerships, the first at Cliff Bank near Stoke and the second with Thomas Whieldon at Fenton Vivian. It was with Whieldon, who was one of the leading potters in the region that Wedgwood began his celebrated ‘Experiment Book’ in which he recorded his scientific developments with glazes, clay slip and firing temperatures. These early experiments were key to his later commercial successes and the development of new types of pottery bodies and innovative decoration.

Josiah Wedgwood established his own manufactory, the Ivy House Works with his cousin Thomas in around 1759. Building on early successes, he moved shortly after this to the Brick House Works. During this time he continually carried out experiments to finesse his creamware body and lead glaze. It was with his creamware body that Wedgwood achieved wide acclaim and commercial success. Josiah was a great publicist of his own wares and during the 1760s he had a growing list of aristocratic patrons, all of whom sought his fashionable creamware. Wedgwood had also keenly courted the patronage of Queen Charlotte who had already commissioned a service from the Chelsea factory in 1762. He gave gifts of creamware (and possibly a ‘caudle service’) to the Queen which culminated in an important royal commission in the form of an elaborate creamware tea-service decorated with raised green flowers on a gilt ground. Following delivery of this service in 1766 Wedgwood became ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ and was permitted to call his creamware ‘Queen’s Ware’. Wedgwood was quick to market his new ‘royal’ creamware and his fame rapidly spread enabling him to develop a flourishing export trade.

Etruria, Josiah Wedgwood’s factory in Stafordshire, showing the Etruria Canal which was built to take away the wares produced. Engraving, London, circa 1860. Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images

The Wedgwood and Bentley Partnership (1768 -1780)
It was on a visit to Liverpool in 1762 (where he was probably going to see the printers Sadler and Green3) that Wedgwood had a chance meeting with Thomas Bentley. Following an attack of smallpox as an apprentice, Wedgwood had reoccurring problems with his right leg. During his trip to Liverpool, Wedgwood further damaged his right knee and was treated by the surgeon Matthew Turner who was a scholarly man of varied interests. Turner bought his friend Thomas Bentley (1730-80), a shipping agent for a Manchester merchant to meet Wedgwood. A deep and long-lasting friendship was to develop between the two men which is well-documented as many of the letters that Wedgwood wrote to Bentley survive. Writing his first letter to Bentley on 13 May 1762, Wedgwood’s warm regard for his new friend is evident ‘My much esteemed friend…there is not a day passes but I reflect with a pleasing gratitude upon the many kind offices I receiv’d in my confinement at your hospitable town. My good doctor and you in particular have my warmest gratitude for the share you both had in promoteing my recovery’.4

Thomas Bentley was a well-travelled and cultivated man who had taken the Grand Tour in 1753. He was a man of refined tastes who had considerable knowledge of classical and renaissance art. As a business partner Bentley offered Wedgwood not only essential commercial experience but also a deep understanding of changing tastes and market trends. In combination with Wedgwood’s inventiveness and deep technical understanding of the art of pottery, Bentley was able to help shape and guide the direction of production. Wedgwood wrote to Bentley ‘In the distribution of our employment between us the manufacturing has fallen to my lot and the sales to yours’. In reality the partnership was much more than a business arrangement and Wedgwood sought Bentley’s opinion on every subject, writing ‘I fancy I can do anything with your help, and have been so much used to it, that when you are not with me upon these occasions I seem to have lost my right arm.’5

Together Wedgwood and Bentley played an important part in the development and expansion of the Trent and Mersey Canal.6 Such public activities brought both partners into contact with an array of important future patrons. The success of the canal scheme allowed Wedgwood to expand his manufactory and he purchased a 350 acre estate through which the canal would pass. This new advantageous position meant that it was much easier and cheaper to transport raw materials into the factory and to transport finished wares out. The new purpose-built factory and the surrounding estate became known as Etruria, named after the ancient central state in Italy whose arts, most notably pottery, were being rediscovered in archaeological digs at the time. The opening of the Etruria factory was momentarily interrupted when Wedgwood’s knee problem worsened, becoming so severe that he required an amputation. He was later supplied with a wooden leg and under the care of his wife, Sarah, and with Bentley’s loyal companionship, his recovery was rapid.7

The production of the ‘First Day’s Vases’ at Etruria marked the beginning of the manufacturing of ‘ornamental’ wares by the Wedgwood and Bentley partnership which was formally agreed in 1769. The Etruria factory was also key to the later successful mass production of ‘Useful’ wares which were produced under the partnership between Josiah and his cousin Thomas. Josiah and his family were to reside on the estate in Etruria Hall and Bentley was given Bank House nearby. Bentley did not choose to reside in Staffordshire however, but preferred to take up residence in London where he could oversee the establishment of a London warehouse and showrooms in St. Martin’s Lane (near the cabinet makers Chippendale, and Vile and Cobb) and later at No. 12 Greek Street in Soho. Bentley also chose to live in the decorating workshop in Chelsea where he could supervise the artists. In London he could keep up to date with changing tastes and styles, manage orders and meet important customers, collect debts and deal with their ever expanding export trade.
Josiah Wedgwood was working in the pottery industry at a time of great change as a result of industrialisation. The purpose-built Etruria factory8 was equipped with the latest technology including a water-wheel (supplying power by water drawn from the canal) and eight ‘hovels’9 which contained ovens or kilns. There were wide gateways which were used for the delivery of clay and coal and the removal of waste. Wedgwood claimed to be the first to introduce an engine-turning lathe into the pottery industry in 1763. Following experiments and improvements to the design of the lathe, Wedgwood was able to exploit its potential for use on a ‘basaltes’ body. Wedgwood’s invention of the pyrometer, a thermometer which gave an accurate estimate of firing temperatures in a kiln further advanced ceramic production but it could also be used for other scientific purposes.10 Through continual experimentation and refinement of manufacturing processes Wedgwood was able to stream-line production to a consistently high standard at a relatively low cost in order to meet the huge demand for his fashionable ornamental wares.

Amongst Wedgwood’s wide circle of gifted friends were members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. The society was established in 1765 with 14 members, all of whom met once a month (as close to a full moon as possible, which would enable a safe journey home) to attend discussions or practical demonstrations. Members included Erasmus Darwin, Wedgwood’s family doctor and poet, Matthew Boulton, the metalworker, ‘toymaker’ and silversmith, James Watt the engineer and inventor, Joseph Priestly a preacher and chemist, and John Whitehurst, horologist and maker of scientific instruments. Wedgwood would have benefitted greatly from discussions with such a creative and innovative group of individuals. He was at the forefront of new scientific developments during an age of enlightenment, discovery and enquiry.

weg5

Both sides of the ‘First Day’s Vase’ in the Wedgwood Museum. Photo © Wedgwood Museum / WWRD

Wedgwood and ‘The Antique’

Wedgwood’s fascination with the ‘Antique’ and rediscovery of the classical world was in part fuelled by the discoveries and excavations at Herculaneum in 1738 and Pompeii in 1763. By the mid-18th century both Rome, and to a lesser extent Naples, had become essential destinations on the Grand Tour. Rome in particular became a place in which artists, collectors and intellectuals could meet and exchange ideas and admire new archaeological discoveries. Piranesi’s publications of views of Rome in the 1740s and Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of Diocletian at Spalato, published in 1764, were widely disseminated, which both popularised classical architecture and lead to a reappraisal of ancient civilisations.11 This obsession with the neo-classical was also a reaction against the extravagances of late Baroque and Rococo designs of the mid-18th century. The neo-classical was deemed elegant, academic and ‘pure’ and Wedgwood was quick to realise the commercial possibilities of this movement. His new stoneware was perfectly suited to the neo-classical ideals of restraint. Always with an eye on the commercial opportunities, many of the shapes of Wedgwood’s vases were based on classical forms, but they were often altered or exaggerated to appeal to his late 18th century cosmopolitan clientele.
It was not long before Wedgwood noticed that great queues of people had gathered outside his showrooms in London and ‘Vases was all the cry’. Wedgwood’s showrooms in Great Newport Street had become a fashionable meeting place where ‘a violent Vase Madness (was) breaking out’.12 Wedgwood creamware and basaltes were not confined to the mantlepieces of fashionable high society; they had become ‘a universal passion’. Wedgwood took advantage of this fashion when formulating plans for his new Etruria factory. In a letter to Bentley in 1766 he claimed that he wanted to make a great ‘Vase work’ which would ‘Surprise the World’.13 Wedgwood consulted Sir William Chambers in an attempt to establish the difference between ‘Urns & Vases’. He concluded that the characteristic of an urn should be‘simplicity, to have covers but no handles, nor spouts…ornamental…either high or low, but sho’d not seem to be Vessels for culinary, or sacred uses.’ Whereas ‘Vases were such as might be used for libations & other sacrificial, festive & culinary uses, such as Ewers, open vessels &c’.14 This categorisation was important in the publication of future factory catalogues and his Ornamental Shapes Book.15

Sir William Hamilton was Ambassador to the court of Naples (1764-1800) and during his time in Italy he took a close interest in the excavations taking place at Herculaneum and Pompeii. He formed an important collection of ancient Greek and Italian vases which were sold to the British Museum in 1772. Between 1766 and 1769 a four volume publication by d’Hancarville of Sir William Hamilton’s collection of antique vases ‘Antiquitiés, Etrusques, Grecques et Romaines’ appeared at a time when interest in the classical world was at its height. The publication also helped to popularise the use of decorative garnitures of vases to adorn mantlepieces. Wedgwood had formed an important friendship with Hamilton, who advised him on matters of taste and design while also helping to promote Wedgwood’s pottery amongst royal and aristocratic circles. Wedgwood had access to early proofs of illustrations from Hamilton’s publication which were leant to him by Lord Cathcart16 and he was also presented with the first published volume of the catalogue.17 The red figure decoration on the First Day’s Vases were taken from a vase in Hamilton’s collection, the Meidias Hydra of circa 420-400 BC, which was subsequently sold with the majority of Hamilton’s collection of ancient vases to the British Museum.18 The figural decoration also appears on plate 129 in the first volume of Hamilton’s catalogue; the subject is titled Hercules in the garden of Hesperides19 and the three figures which appear on this particular version of the First Day’s Vase are Oineus, Demophon and Chrysis.20 The form of the vase was copied precisely from a vase which appears as part of an engraving in the preface to Volume I of Hamilton’s catalogue. Hamilton offered Wedgwood valuable advice on the design and interpretation of his antique vase collection, ‘Continue to be very attentive to the simplicity and elegance of the form, which is the chief article…You cannot consult the originals in the museum too often’.21

weg7

P. d’Hancarville, Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of Honble William Hamilton, 1776, Vol. I, plate 129.

Wedgwood and Bentley also had a vast library of reference books of engravings, from which they copied a number of shapes and bas-reliefs. Amongst these were Jacques Stella’s Livre de Vases and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens. Inspiration for vase shapes was drawn from a wide variety of sources including vases seen in London shops, or from the private collections of important patrons. This included Hamilton’s famed Barberini vase, which he sold to the Duchess of Portland, who in turn leant it to Wedgwood who produced celebrated copies of it. Wedgwood owed much to Hamilton for providing an extensive source of design inspiration for vase shapes, decoration and (later) for bas-relief ornament.22

By 1768 Wedgwood had vases of three different types in production: creamware, variegated ware and black ‘basaltes’. Whilst he had achieved great commercial success and market dominance with his production of creamware, interest in this was waning and new products were required to retain his patrons’ custom. Wedgwood was keen to replicate the look of ‘Egyptian black’ ware which was already in production at other Staffordshire potteries. In order to recreate this black stoneware body, Wedgwood carried out countless experiments on local clay impregnated with carr, an oxide derived from iron residue taken from the local coal mines. He found that he could create a ‘superior’ quality basaltes body by using magnesium to obtain a richer black colour together with west-country clay to give a finer texture. Great care was taken in the purification of the cleansing of the local carr. Wedgwood was so excited by this new fashionable basaltes stoneware that he chose to use it for the production of his First Day’s Vases, rather than use his tried and tested creamware body, as basaltes was perfectly suited for vases in the neo-classical taste. The first trials with black basaltes were probably carried out in July 1766 and in 1768 Wedgwood informed Bentley of the dispatch of twelve crates of wares including ‘a basket containing 2 Etruscan bronze Vases’.23 This is the first mention of the basaltes body as ‘Etruscan’ which may perhaps have been a misunderstanding by Wedgwood as the pottery which was being excavated in Italy was predominately not Etruscan but had been imported from Greece. Wedgwood had also seen illustrations of Etruscan bucchero nero from the 8th century BC which is a black pottery which is moulded or incised with ornament, and this may have inspired his use of the term. Either way, Wedgwood marketed all wares of this type as ‘Etruscan’. The black surface could be polished with leather and then finished to look like simulated bronze, or as in the case of the present vase, decorated with encaustic painting.

In 1769 Wedgwood took out a patent for both his new bronzing process and for his red-orange encaustic-style decoration. These processes were perfected to emulate the look of ancient bronze vessels and to recreate the Greek red-figure decoration which was seen on black-ground vases painted in Athens in circa 530-400 BC.24 On receiving the first of his encaustic vases which were returned from his London decorating workshop, Wedgwood proclaimed ‘I have seen the vases Encaustick & like them exceedingly’.25 The encaustic decoration on the present vase is most likely to be by the painter William Hopkins Craft, and not by David Rhodes of Leeds, as previously thought. Craft was one of the most skilled painters employed by Wedgwood in their London decorating workshop, and he worked mainly on encaustic decoration of basaltes vases. However, Craft demanded £200 a year, which Wedgwood considered ‘too extravagant to be lasting’26 and their working relationship ended in 1771 when Craft became an independent enameller.

The death of Thomas Bentley in 178027 was a major loss for Josiah and he proved irreplaceable. A year after Bentley’s death, Wedgwood decided to sell the stock and trade owned under their partnership at Christie’s & Ansell in Pall Mall. The eleven day sale which included 1200 lots caused great excitement and was a huge commercial success. As contemporaries within the art world, James Christie and Josiah Wedgwood would have been part of the same social circles. It seems fitting that we are offering this First Day’s Vase, which encapsulates the creative genius and entrepreneurialism of one of the most celebrated partnerships in British ceramic and industrial history, in 2016, the 250th anniversary of Christie’s. Testament to Wedgwood’s innovation is the epitaph on his monument in Stoke which was modelled by Flaxman: ‘He converted a rude and inconsiderable manufactory into an elegant and an important National Commerce.’

1. Correspondence between Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Bentley is extensively documented in Robin Reilly’s seminal two volume publication, Wedgwood, see Vol. I, p. 437. The comment indicating that the First Day’s Vases were ‘three handled’ is in fact a reference to the finial and two handles. When the Etruria factory was eventually closed on 13 June 1950, 181 years after Wedgwood and Bentley had thrown their six ‘First Day’s Vases’, six ‘Last Day’s Vases’ were made to commemorate the closure.
2. Robin Reilly, ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I, p. 26.
3. Wedgwood was at the forefront of new technological developments in transfer-printing on pottery and porcelain. Guy Green and John Sadler ran a transfer printing business in Liverpool where they had an arrangement with Wedgwood whereby he had a monopoly on the use of their transfer prints. Wedgwood sold Sadler and Green his creamware and in turn they decorated the creamware with suitable transfer prints and then sold it back to Wedgwood from their Liverpool warehouse.
4. Robin Reilly, ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I, p. 47.
5. See Robin Reilly, ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I, p. 102.
6. Wedgwood, with the help of his friend Erasmus Darwin produced a pamphlet to popularise the proposed canal project.
7. See Alison Kelly, The Story of Wedgwood, London, 1975, p. 27.
8. Wedgwood also considered the welfare of his workers key to a successful manufactory and he provided housing for many of his staff on the grounds of the Etruria estate and even subsidised a ‘sick club’.
9. A ‘hovel’ is the common term for a bottle kiln. Wedgwood’s initial sketch of the ground-plan of the Etruria factory included eight hovels which he drew in elaborate and amusing shapes including: a beehive, a castellated sheep keep and a milk churn. The Etruria hovels were eventually built in the conventional bottle shape.
10. Wedgwood was elected a fellow of the Royal Society following his research and development of the pyrometer on 16 January 1783.
11. Wedgwood was a great admirer of Robert Adam and wrote to Bentley on 7th September 1771 ‘Adam is a Man of Genius & invention & an excellent Architect & Mr. Truman assured me that he knew Mr. Adam’s [sic] kept modellers at Rome employed in copying Bas-reliefs and other things for them a connection with them would be of great use to us’. See Diana Edwards, Black Basalt, Wedgwood and Contemporary Manufacturers, Suffolk, 1994, p. 39.
12. Robin Reilly, ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I, p. 439.
13. Robin Reilly ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I, p. 68.
14. Robin Reilly, ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I, p. 69.
15. The First Day’s Vases are shape No. 49 in Wedgwood’s Ornamental Shapes Book.
16. Lord Cathcart was Ambassador to Russia and instrumental in promoting Wedgwood’s pottery to Catherine the Great. This resulted in two important orders for Wedgwood creamware: the Husk Service (1770) and the Frog Service (1773).
17. Wedgwood & Bentley also looked to other sources for inspiration for their red-figure encaustic wares which included Recueil d’antiquités, Egyptiennes, Etrusques, Grecques, Romaines et Gauloises by Anne-Claude-Philippe, comte de Caylus, which was published in seven volumes in Paris between 1752-1767.
18. See the British Museum, accession no. 1772,0320.30.
19. This was a popular subject and appears frequently on ancient Attic red-figured vases. Herakles’s 11th Labour is depicted, in which he is commanded by Eurystheus to steal golden apples belonging to Zeus which had been given to Hera at her wedding and entrusted to the care of the Hesperides (the daughters of Atlas) in the Garden of Hesperides. Herakles persuaded Atlas to fetch the apples for him and in return he shouldered the heavens in place of Atlas.
20. One of the First Day’s Vases which are in the Wedgwood Museum is decorated with the opposing three figures Hippothon, Antichus and Clymenos taken from the left side of plate 129 from the first volume of William Hamilton’s catalogue.
21. Robin Reilly, ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I, pp. 82-83
22. In return for Hamilton’s help, Wedgwood reproduced in black basaltes, white terracotta stoneware and jasperware a portrait medallion of Hamilton of circa 1772.
23. Robin Reilly, ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I p. 397.
24. The ancient technique of red-figure decoration involved drawing an outline of a figure (for example) in black on the red body of the vase, the entire body was painted in black slip. Details could then be picked out in black and touched-in with slip which was diluted to a pale brown. The pigment that Wedgwood’s used was his own invention and was part slip and part enamel.
25. Robin Reilly, ibid., London, 1989, Vol. I, p. 71.
26. Robin Reilly, Wedgwood, the New Illustrated Dictionary, London, 1995, p. 121.
27. Epitaphs to the memory of Thomas Bentley were composed by Erasmus Darwin and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart amongst others.

mei1

mei2

mei3

mei8

mei10

Lot 305. The Great Bustard from Augustus The Strong’s Porcelain Menagerie. A Meissen white model of a great bustard (otis tarda), 1732, attributed to Johann Gottlieb Kirchner, incised initials as to the underside of the beak for Andreas Schiefer. Estimate £700,000 - £1,000,000 ($907,200 - $1,296,000). Price Realized £842,500 ($1,091,880) (€984,040). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Naturalistically modelled, its neck turned to the right preening its feathers, on a tree trunk base applied with trailing leaves, branches and acorns (minor damages, typical firing flaws, two leaves replaced, some restoration shoring up the tree stump visible on the underside); 33 in. (83.8 cm.) high

Provenance: Supplied to Augustus II (1694-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland for the Japanese Palace, Dresden.
By descent through the Royal House of Saxony (the House of Wettin).
Anonymous sale; Christie’s, London, 5 July 1971, lot 126.
Acquired from the Antique Porcelain Company, New York, 1993.

Property from the Estate of Ogden Mills Phipps

Notes: This extraordinary Meissen model of a Great Bustard (Otis tarda) is one of only six examples delivered to Augustus the Strong in the early 1730s for his porcelain menagerie at the Japanese Palace in the Royal court of Dresden, five of which are extant. Four are now in museum collections. The present example remains the only known model of a Great Bustard in private hands.1 Augustus the Strong’s obsession for his own porcelain factory – the Meissen factory - to surpass Far Eastern porcelain production reached its zenith in the creation of these near life-size animals and birds. One of twenty-eight varieties of birds modelled for the Japanese Palace, the bustard is amongst the rarest by the Meissen modeller Johann Gottlieb Kirchner. Dresden was the greatest Baroque city in Northern German and Augustus’s lavish court rivaled that of Versailles. The birds and animals were to become the centerpiece of Augustus the Strong’s porzellanschloss at Dresden - a lavish display of the skillful virtuosity of the Meissen modellers considered today to be the most important of porcelain sculpture.

mei4

Portrait of Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, after Louis de Silvestre.

The Development of the Japanese Palace
In 1714 Field Marshall and Privy Cabinet Minister Count Jakob Heinrich von Flemming bought several plots of land to the right side of the bank of the Elbe where a small palace was built, known as the Holländisches Palais or Dutch Palace on account of its furnishings. Augustus the Strong acquired the palace in 1717 in exchange for land worth 100,000 Thalers and he became intently involved in the remodelling and furnishing of the palace. Augustus had part of the kunstkammer installed in the attic in 1717: ‘His Royal Majesty bought the palace for a large sum of money in 1717 on account of its splendor and excellent situation, and has preserved it for posterity under the name of the Japanese Palace…Having done this, he had the world-famous kunstkammer bought to this palace three years ago from Neu-Dresden for the sake of good air.’ 2

This is the earliest reference to the palace as the Japanese Palace and an indication of Augustus’s move to create aPorzellanschloss. The palace became the centre of royal festivities in 1719 when Augustus hosted a celebration of the marriage of his son, Prince Friedrich Augustus II to Maria Josepha of Austria. Guests included important European royal and nobility and Augustus the Strong wanted to be sure that they would be impressed and amazed by the magnificence of the furnishings and decoration. The palace was used to host a number of celebrations in the 1720s and it became a centerpiece to his string of castles and palaces around Dresden. Augustus had initially planned to remodel Schloss Pillnitz to house his expanding porcelain collection, in the style of a ‘Saxon Versailles’. However, plans to redevelop Pillnitz did not come to fruition. Instead, Augustus transferred his attention to the expansion and remodelling of the Dutch Palace which would be designed specifically to house the Royal porcelain collection. The palace was to include 32 rooms spread across a four-wing layout with projecting corner pavilion. The work was orchestrated by General Jean de Bodt and three Oberlandbaumeister, the chief architects of Saxony - Pöpelmann, Zacharias Longuelune, and Knevel.3 Architectural plans for the interior scheme of the Japanese Palace were rigorously overseen by Augustus the Strong himself with many of the ground plans annotated or amended in his own hand.

Augustus’s acquisition of porcelain was closely tied to the specific requirements of his planned interior layout. A hand-drawn plan of 1728 clearly indicates that he had intended to group his porcelain according to colour or type, rather than using it to furnish the palace in the traditional sense. The interior decoration of the palace was closely tied to the decoration of the porcelain, its walls to be clad in embroidered Indian satin and lacquer. Numerous alterations to the interiors schemes were made by Augustus during the planning stage but it is clear that he intended that the ground floor should be furnished with Far Eastern porcelain. Surviving plans for the upper story of the palace suggest that the porcelain was to be grouped according to colour or type (celadon, purple or green coloured porcelain for example4). The palace was intended to provide a courtly function but it also had symbolic significance at a political, cultural and spiritual level. Walking through room after room filled with jewel-like porcelain, guests would eventually arrive at the purple throne room in which there would be a porcelain throne and a porcelain Glockenspiel.

The elevations and cross-sections show pagoda-like roofs painted with indianische Blumen5, similar to the roofs of the Zwinger. The chinoiserie pagoda design was used in the two-stepped baldacchinos which are above the corner pavilions’ middle window. The decoration in relief above the Neustadt side of the portico depicts Minerva enthroned as Goddess of Trade being offered porcelain treasures from Far Eastern figures and clearly indicates the identity of the building. Other elements of the building design related to Meissen porcelain production including the inner courtyard which features herm pilasters in the form of grinning pot-bellied chinamen. These figures were probably inspired by models made by the sculptor Johann Christian Kirchner. However, a later floor plan indicates that ‘all sorts of animals with red-lacquered porcelain or brown porcelain’ were planned for the large Neustadt-side gallery.

Augustus the Strong made regular inspections of the project before his trips to Poland. Although he was never to see the finished palace as he died in Warsaw on 1 February 1733, the work remained on-going. Augustus III continued with some of his father’s plans, however the plans for the interior were given up in around 1740.

Technical innovations and developments at the Meissen manufactory meant that by 1730 Böttger’s earlier claims ‘that in the future, given the right design and production, white porcelain of this kind…shall be able to surpass Asian porcelain by far, not only in beauty and quality, but also in variety of shapes and large pieces, some even solid, such as statues, columns, service and so on’ were fast becoming a reality.6 Augustus the Strong’s obsession to surpass Far Eastern production in a display of technical virtuosity could be embodied in the production of ‘life-size’ animals. Several of Augustus’ palaces had animal enclosures and these were important in Princely lavish displays of power. The use of wild and exotic animals during pageants was intended not only to astonish the crowd but to demonstrate the Prince’s power over these magnificent creatures. It was also in keeping with the Baroque idea of bringing order to the world.

Contemporary accounts of events at Schloss Moritzburg talk of themed processions in which figures in costume were accompanied by ‘lions, tigers, bears, parrots, all manner of monkeys, and the like’.7 Like many of his royal contemporaries, Augustus the Strong collected exotic birds and animals and he was a keen and accomplished huntsman. His menagerie or Löwenhaus (lion house) was central to court life at Dresden and it included a number of savage beasts which were used for animal fights and hunting. Augustus also received several gifts of exotic animals, including a present from the King of Sweden in 1731 ‘….a lion and lioness, and also two tigers, are good-looking beasts, excepting that the lion only has one eye’.8 Augustus even tried to purchase rare specimens of animals in exchange for Meissen porcelain, both being highly prized ‘commodities’. This included polar bears and artic foxes which he acquired through the Saxon ambassador in St. Petersburg.9 If Augustus could not trade his valuable Meissen porcelain, he sought out rare beasts through the East India Company which had a flourishing trade in rare and exotic animals and birds. Huge amounts of money exchanged hands for unusual and exotic species. A letter dated 16 February 1717 records the cost of a crane at a 1000 gulden and a cockatoo for 300.

As a young man, Augustus the Strong had embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe (1687-9). The splendor of the architecture and artistic display seen on his visit to the Court of Louis XIV at Versailles left a deep impression of the power and authority that could come from lavish and creative displays of artistry. The French royal court was the first to bring together a royal collection of animals in an enclosure similar to that of a menagerie. During his visit, Augustus took note of the maze that had been built at Versailles. Designed by André LeNôtre and Charles Perrault in 1673-74 and centred around 39 fountains which were modelled on the theme of La Fontaine’s fables, each fountain was modelled in lead and coloured as an animal, with the head and mouth forming the spout. These fabulous creatures were combined with trellis, grottos, shells and hedge to create a mystical world. Animal sculpture was popular in Baroque gardens and architectural schemes, where they were often used as heraldic devices, but their representation could also convey a deeper meaning, not lost on the young Augustus.

With the arrival of the Kunstkammer, plans to fill the palace with porcelain were already underway. Once visitors had reached the upper story, they would then pass along the Neustadt-side gallery where the animal models were to be displayed. The decision to use the large Neustad-side gallery for the display of the animals was made in the summer of 1730 and the success of the project was dependent on the Modellmeister having not only the creativity but also a deep understanding of the technical challenges that such an ambitious project would bring.

The task of creating the porcelain menagerie was given to Gottlieb Kirchner, who was the first sculptor permanently employed by the factory. He had been taken on initially as a modeller at Meissen but was now responsible for the realisation of these models in porcelain. Kirchner was a difficult character but he had valuable experience of working in porcelain which was essential to the early successes of the factory. He was joined shortly after by Johann Joachim Kändler who was employed as an assistant in June 1731. As a sculptor, Kändler had never worked in porcelain before but his unique style and skills developed quickly. B oth modelers either studied their subjects from live beasts in the collection of the Mortizburg menagerie or the Dresden Löwenhaus, or sketched them from specimens in theAnimaliengalerie at the Zwinger in Dresden. When Kirchner was making his only large bird model, the bustard, he may well have been influenced by the cassowary which Kändler had made a month before. In all other figures, however there are very few parallels of this kind as both sculptors had a distinct and unique style.10

When the animals and birds were finally delivered to the Japanese Palace, the rooms were still not ready and so they were simply stored rather than displayed there. Dresden inventories show that the number of animals stored at the palace slowly depleted as some were put on display elsewhere (for example in the Tower Room at the Residence), a few were damaged and others were given away as Royal gifts. It is interesting to note that a bill from the end of December 1732 titled ‘for the animals and birds hitherto delivered to the Japanese Palace’ amounted to a fifth of Augustus the Strong’s total porcelain debts.11

The vast majority of the larger animals and birds remained together until the beginning of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 when they were moved to the cellar of the palace. In the late 18th century, Count Camillo Marcolini attempted to move the figures to the Zwinger, as he felt that they would be better appreciated within the curated context of a museum. This did not materialize, however, and the figures remained in the cellar until they were eventually transferred with the remainder of the collection to the Johanneum (a former stable building). Here the animals were seen in all of their sculptural glory. The porcelain collection was installed in a porcelain gallery which was set up in the castle banqueting hall. In the early part of the 20th century, plans were reformulated to house the collection at the Zwinger where it was partially displayed in 1939. The Porzellansammlung opened to the public in 1962 in its current home in the Zwinger.

mei5

Johann Auguste Corvinus’s view of the Dutch Palace in Dresden, 1719, which was later extended into the Japanese Palace.Engraving© bpk / Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden / Renate Schurz

The Making of the Menagerie

The process of producing birds and animals on such a monumental scale was fraught with technical difficulties and all Japanese Palace models bear the physical signs of these challenges. The first stage in the creation of these models was for the artists Kirchner and Kändler (and later, to a much lesser extent Johann Friedrich Eberlein) to produce an original model in clay. Kirchner notes in his working report of November 1732 that he had ‘made, en plein air, the roughest of models’ of three wild cats and a porcupine.12 This model could be cut into sections and plaster casts could then be taken of each section. A large bird or animal was assembled from several moulds which were then reassembled and fitted on to a base, or left free-standing. The initial model had to be made bigger than the size intended for the end product as the porcelain could reduce in size by around a sixth following drying and firing. The porcelain paste itself was mixed according to a recipe that varied depending on the nature of the model being produced. The main problem during the first few years of production was getting a model successfully through the firing process in a stable and undamaged state with as few imperfections as possible. The process was highly experimental and changes to the paste and glaze recipe were frequently made, which often resulted in a granular texture or a grey colour.

Producing porcelain on such a large scale was a demanding task and for practical reasons the craftsmen involved often worked in a team, with the moulder working alongside a repairer who would assemble and finish the piece. Models are rarely marked although the bustard bears the ‘AS’ mark of the repairer Andreas Schiefer, whose distinctive incising and hatching can be seen on this model, the bustard in the collection of Henry Arnhold and the three cats in the Dresden collection which also bear Andreas Schiefer’s mark. When the model had been assembled and the repairer had achieved a degree of finesse by both blending the different parts of the model together and picking out details, the model was then set aside to dry out to the 'leather-hard' stage.13 As they were particularly large, this took about three months. They had to be dried out slowly, in humid conditions, as rapid drying would induce an early version of the cracking problem that is so very typical of the Japanese Place animals.

Prior to glazing the model was given a low-temperature ‘biscuit’ firing. Large figures of animals and birds were too big to be dunked in glaze but had to be ‘basted’ with areas touched-up with a brush. The final firing process posed the greatest challenge as the contraction of the paste (in opposition to the weight of the figure) often resulted in shrinkage, sagging and extensive firing cracks. Those models which were more vertically orientated (such as Kirchner’s bustard) often fared better during the firing process than those which were constructed as a horizontal structure (such as the pelican) and therefore it was possible to use a more refined paste which gave them a finer appearance. Experiments were carried out with different types of bases and supports to stablise the figures and avoid sagging. Interior ‘scaffolding’ was used to brace the inside of bases with plates and cylinders. Following the firing, during which there was a large level of wastage, severe firing cracks were filled using a sticky brown resin or in the case of very large cracks, these were filled with wood and then filled.

The six bustards which are recorded in the 1731-34 delivery to the Japanese Palace were all decorated with cold colours, as the risks involved with an enamel firing would have been too great for models of these size.14 Interestingly not all of the animals were decorated and Kändler did not approve of the decoration, which he felt spoilt the sculptural qualities of the animals. At some later point, most of the coloured animals were deliberately stripped of their decoration, as photographs of the displays of animals in the Zwinger Palace taken in the late 19th Century show them in the white. It is therefore likely that a decision was taken that the cold enamel had become so degraded that it should be removed.

mei6

mei7

Zacharius Longuelune’s ink and wash designs showing porcelain on brackets for the furnishing of the Neustadt-side gallery of the Japanese Palace, Dresden, before 1730. © Courtesy of the Sächsisches Staatsarchiv, Dresden.

1. Four models of bustards were ordered for the Japanese Palace in November 1732, although five examples were subsequently delivered between 1731-34. All of them are recorded as decorated with cold colours that were later removed. Oddly, six models of bustards are recorded in the Royal collection of Saxony in the Inventarium of 1770 and again in 1779. However, Samuel Wittwer records only five as extant in 2006: two white examples of bustards in the Dresden Porcelain Collection, an example in the Frick Collection from the collection of Henry Arnhold, another in the Museo Civico, Turin and a fifth in ‘a private Italian collection’, which is most likely the present example. See Samuel Wittwer, The Gallery of Meissen Animals, Munich, 2006, pp. 330-331.
2. Samuel Wittwer, Ibid., 2006, Munich, p. 32.
3. Samuel Wittwer, Ibid., 2006, Munich, p. 34.
4. Samuel Wittwer illustrates the assorted floorplans, see ibid., 2006, Munich, p. 33, figs. 31-33. The symbolic significance of the coloured displays of porcelain in each room would not have been lost on visitors to the Palace. Each room represented a different quality or state which was expressed through colour, for example red conveyed power, green symbolised humility, yellow conveyed splendour, blue gave a sense of divinity, before arriving into the throne room which was decorated in purple which conveyed authority. 5. Samuel Wittwer, Ibid., 2006, Munich, p. 35
6. Samuel Wittwer, ibid., Munich, 2006, p. 59, quoted from Zimmermann 1908, 322.
7. Samuel Wittwer, ibid., Munich, 2006, p. 60 where the author cites Johann Michael von Leon’s 1740 account of a parade which took place on 14th October 1718.
8. Samuel Wittwer, ibid., Munich, 2006, p. 63 where the author cites the lion keeper.
9. Samuel Wittwer, ibid., Munich, 2006, p. 64.
10. Samuel Wittwer, ibid., Munich, 2006, p. 116.
11. Samuel Wittwer, Ibid., Munich, 2006, p. 51.
12. Cited by Samuel Wittwer, ibid., 2006, pp. 77 & 250.
13. Models such as the bustard, were required to become gradually thinner towards the top so that they did not collapse under their own weight during the firing.
14. The court painter and lacquer Christian Reinow appears to have been employed to decorate white models with a sealed lacquer finish following the application of oil paints.

sev1

sev2

sev3

sev4

sev11

sev12

Lot 330. A pair of Sèvres two-handled bleu céleste ice-pails, covers and liners (seaux ‘à glace’) from the Catherine The Great service, circa 1778-1779, one with blue interlaced L marks enclosing date letters AA, FB for Francois-Marie Barrat, B for Jean-Pierre Boulanger and grey LG for Le Guay, the other with mauve interlaced L mark and LG for Le Guay, both liners with mauve interlaced L marks and LG marks for Le Guay. Estimate £700,000 - £1,000,000 ($907,200 - $1,296,000). Price Realized £842,500 ($1,091,880) (€984,040). Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Of urn-shaped form with richly-gilt female herm handles, the gilt-scroll friezes painted with simulated portrait cameos and antique mythological bas reliefs, the lower parts with up-turned gilt laurel leaves, a white beaded border simulating pearls below and at the rim, the covers with gilt fountain handles above a band of flowers enclosed by a frieze of gilt scrolls divided by cameos, amorous and Bacchic trophy medallions and Imperial crowned EII cypher medallions, the exterior of the galleried sides each mounted with four cut hard-paste portrait cameos within gilt-copper laurel garlands, below undulating rims moulded with gilt frozen overflowing water, slight wear to gilding, oneseau broken and restored, one liner with restored rim chip and very small restored chipping to edge of well, one cover with stem of finial restored and small restored rim chip; 9 ¾ in. (24.8 cm.) high

Provenance: Delivered to Prince Grigori Potemkin in St. Petersburg as part of a large dinner, dessert, tea and coffee-service in October 1779 as a gift from Empress Catherine the Great of Russia.
Given by Prince Potemkin to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia and moved to the Winter Palace, St. Petersburg, on 26 July 1782, and by descent to
Tsar Alexander I of Russia
Taken from the Winter Palace during the fire of 17 December 1837.
Presumably shipped to London by Ferdinando Civiliotti and sold to the dealers Storr and Mortimer, 156 New Bond Street, London.
Acquired probably by 20 July 1840 or by 21 July 1842 by William Viscount Lowther (later 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, from 1844), Carlton House Terrace, London.
Octavius E. Coope Collection, of Rochetts, near Brentwood, probably via the dealer John Webb, 22 Cork Street, Mayfair, London.
Octavius E. Coope posthumous sale; Christie’s, London, 3 May 1910, lot 167 (illustrated), and sold to Goldschmidt.
Walter and Catalina von Pannwitz Collection, Hartekamp Castle, Heemstede Holland, by 1925.
Acquired from Rosenberg & Stiebel, New York, 1993.

Property of Dimitri Mavrommatis

Literature: Otto von Falke, Die Kunstsammlung von Pannwitz, Munich, 1925, Vol. II, p. 37, nos. 428-29, pl. LXXIV.
Rosalind Savill, The Wallace Collection, Catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain, London, 1988, p. 773 and p. 782, note 102.
Adrian Sassoon, Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain from a European Private Collection, Exhibition Catalogue, The International Ceramics Fair and Seminar, London, 2001, pp. 5-6.
Valérie Bougault, ‘La passion du Sèvres’, Connaissance des Arts, October 2004, p. 61 (unillustrated).
Oscar Humphries, ‘House of Wonders’, Apollo Magazine, March 2013, p. 88.

Exhibited: London, The International Ceramics Fair and Seminar, Vincennes and Sèvres Porcelain from a European Private Collection, 15-18 June 2001, no. 17.

Notes: These ice-pails, or seaux ‘à glace’, are from the famous Catherine the Great Service, also known as the ‘Cameo Service’ or Service aux Camées. The Cameo Service was the most elaborate and expensive service ever produced by Sèvres. Pieces from it rarely appear on the market as the majority of the service is in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Sèvres made 10 seaux ‘à glace’ for the service, 4 of which are in the Wallace Collection, London, and 4 of which are in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg. The remaining 2, the present seaux ‘à glace’, are the only examples in private hands.1 There is a small group of pieces from the service (of other forms) which are not in the Hermitage, and most of these pieces are in museums.2

The Cameo Service was the product of a love affair between Catherine the Great and Prince Grigori Potemkin. Catherine met Potemkin on the day of her coup, when she had her husband, Tsar Peter III, strangled. An act of gallantry brought the 28 year-old guardsman Potemkin to her attention, and he subsequently became part of her inner circle. As his rapport with the Empress grew, so did the jealousy of her lover at the time, Alexei Orlov. After her affair with Orlov had ended, she briefly turned her attentions to Alexander Vasilchikov before Potemkin engineered his replacement as her lover in January 1774. Catherine became utterly smitten with Potemkin, a witty and dashing war hero of over six feet tall, and it is possible that they married secretly.3 Aside from his blue-eyed good looks, he was also one of Russia’s finest cavalry commanders. In June 1774 Catherine wrote to him: ‘My darling, darling my dear, my beloved, I have lost all common sense today. Love, love is the reason. I love you with my heart, mind, soul and body. I love you with all my senses and shall love you eternally’.4 In 1776 she ennobled Potemkin and gave him Anichkov House, a large residence by the river Neva. Other lavish gifts, including the Cameo Service, followed.

sev5

sev6

In 1776 the Empress commissioned the Cameo Service via her lover, Prince Potemkin. A recently discovered letter that she wrote to Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm5 in March 1778 reveals that although the order for the service was commissioned in her name, she intended it to be a gift to Potemkin. She purposefully ordered it for herself to ensure that Sèvres produced a service of the very highest quality; 'Le service de Sèvres que j’ai commandé est pour le premier rongeur de doigts de l’univers, pour mon cher et bien-aimé prince Potemkine, et pour qu’il soit le plus beau, j’ai dit qu’il est pour moi’ (The Sèvres service that I ordered is for the most nervous and impatient man in the universe, for my dear and beloved Prince Potemkin, and, in order that it be as beautiful as possible, I said that it was for me’).6 On 16th July Potemkin instructed the director of the cabinet of Her Imperial Majesty, K.V. Olsufyev, to order the service through Prince Ivan Sergeyvich Bariatinsky, her ambassador to Louis XVI’s Court at Versailles. Potemkin’s instructions were that the dinner, dessert, tea and coffee-service should be for sixty placings, and that it should be in ‘the best and newest style, with Her Majesty’s monogram on every piece’, and that it should be ‘without any deviation from antique models, with reproductions of cameos’.7 The Imperial EII cypher (for Ekaterina II) was used, and Catherine also specified that the ground colour should be bleu celeste, imitating turquoise stone, and a particular hue of ‘bleu celeste imitant la turquoise’ was used.

The technical difficulty of fulfilling Catherine’s choice of ground colour and the inclusion of ‘cameos’ led to the service’s most extraordinary and innovative feature; the grandest pieces of the service are mounted with hard-paste cameos which are cut with portraits to resemble real cameos.8 As Savill notes, the inclusion of cut simulated cameos were almost certainly Catherine’s idea because when she balked at the price of the service, and her ambassador Bariatinsky investigated the reasons for the extremely high price, he was reminded by the factory that the expense of the service was partly due to his request to include the cameos.9

In order to fulfil the imperial order, Sèvres had to solve a major technical difficulty: only a soft-paste porcelain body was suitable for the bleu celeste ground colour,10 but only the newly developed hard-paste porcelain was suitable to be cut to simulate cameos. The ingenious solution to this problem was to set the hard-paste cameos into the soft-paste body of the most important pieces, and fix them in place with gilt-copper laurel-garland mounts.11 The hard-paste cameos were produced by fusing two layers of a dark reddish-brown hard paste and white hard paste together and then cutting through the top white layer with stone-cutting wheels to create the effect of antique Greek and Roman agate-onyx cameos. New mills to power the cutting-wheels were designed and built at Sèvres with a lapidary workshop above, and this process cost 40,000 livres. Each cut cameo was charged at 96 livres, and the overall cost of each seau à glace was a prodigious 2,058 livres - 10 times the cost of other seaux à glace (of conventional form) with best quality decoration. The hard-paste cameos were complimented by painted cameos which only cost 8 livres each, and an innovative form of transfer-printing was used for the initial outline of these cameos.12 The painted simulated bas-relief scenes were based on antique medallions and bracelets.

sev7

The first hard-paste cameo experiments were taken to Versailles for Louis XVI’s approval on 24th December 1777, and a surviving memorandum (which may have been sent with the cameos) suggests that the designs for the cameos in the service were based on antique originals in the king’s collection, as it asked if he would allow the factory to copy some of the cameos in the cabinet du Roi.13 As Savill notes: ‘red-wax casts (possibly from the originals), plaster and unmounted porcelain versions are at Sèvres’.14 It is interesting to note the striking similarity between the head of Jupiter on one of the present seaux à glace to that in a vignette published in the catalogue of the cameo collection of the King’s cousin, Louis Philippe Joseph, duc d’Orléans. This vignette, engraved by Auguste de St. Aubin, features a head of Jupiter after an engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi of a gold medal in the collection of the lawyer and collector Matthew Duane in London. It is perhaps possible that Sèvres utilised the Bartolozzi print as a source for this cameo (or Auguste de St. Aubin’s engraving if they had access to it).15 Only a few years later, the duc d’Orléans sold his cameo collection to Catherine The Great in 1787 to pay off his gambling debts.

sev13

The other important innovative feature of the service was its design and decoration. The Cameo Service was the first service to be made in the neo-classical style, for which completely new sets of designs and moulds were required. None of these were ever reused. Louis-Simon Boizot, the head of the sculptors’ workshop, most probably designed the forms of the service. Having been to Rome, Boizot had the necessary schooling in classical vocabulary, and, in addition to the dinner, dessert, coffee and tea-service he designed a large white biscuit centrepiece and ninety white biscuit table-decoration figures as a compliment to the wares.16 The gilt scroll friezes were based on the frieze of the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome,17 and the white bead-ornament borders simulated pearls.

To complete the commission, Sèvres called upon many of its greatest resources; at least 37 of its 69 painters, 5 of its 13 gilders and nearly all of its modellers and kiln managers. The completion of the project brought about a stylistic revolution and many technical innovations (which ultimately expanded the production capabilities of Sèvres), but it also brought the factory close to bankruptcy. The year 1777 was largely dedicated to the project and to the creation of new forms and elaborate decorative schemes. The following year was largely devoted to painting and 1779 to gilding, firing and the burnishing of the pieces. On 20th May 1779 Louis XVI visited the factory five days after the final seau ‘à bouteille’ had been fired.

sev13 (2)

It is not absolutely clear what the total cost of the service was, or exactly how many pieces were sent to St. Petersburg. Although the manufactory Registres du magasin des Ventes recorded a list of 778 pieces for the service and 77 pieces for the centrepiece, it corresponds neither to the total number appearing in the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs records, nor to the number of objects noted as received in St. Petersburg. It is thought that the final total cost was 331,317 livres, a truly prodigious sum, which Catherine paid in instalments, with the final instalment of 90,000 livresclearing the bill in 1792. Surviving correspondence tracing the evolution of the project is retained at Sèvres, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris (which retains a bound volume of Dessins et Devis du Service de Porcelaine pour l'Imperatrice de Russie 1778), and at the Archives of St. Petersburg.

The completed service was dispatched to Russia by sea on a Dutch ship from Rouen in June 1779, arriving at St. Petersburg in October, where it was delivered Potemkin at the Tauride Palace. The service had taken almost four years to produce, and by the time it arrived Catherine and Potemkin’s tempestuous affair was already over. The cracks in their relationship had begun to appear in the middle of 1775, so presumably one of Catherine’s motivations for the quantity and quality of the gifts that she bestowed upon him was an attempt to keep the relationship on course. Potemkin’s temper frequently flared up and his passion for Catherine was waning. Catherine wrote to him: “I ask God to forgive you your vain despair and violence but also your injustice to me. I believe that you love me in spite of the fact that often there is no trace of love in your words’.18

Although they were ultimately unable to make their relationship work as lovers, they remained devoted to one another platonically, and (which shocked Europe at the time), they both arranged to take on younger lovers. Over the years Catherine continued her pursuit of younger men and they were usually procured by Potemkin, being vetted first for venereal disease by the Scottish doctor John Rogerson.19 When Potemkin sold Anichkov to pay his debts, Catherine bought it back, and he gave the Sèvres Cameo Service to Catherine. The service arrived at the Winter Palace on 26th July 1782.

sev13 (3)

As replacements for the service were made by the Imperial porcelain factory in the 19th century, the service must have been used at the Winter Palace. Catherine would (presumably) have used the service for State Banquets, and, when it was not in use, the service was probably put on display.20 The seaux ‘à glace’, or ice-pails, were important components of the service and their function was to keep ice-cream or sorbet cool. The ice-cream or sorbet would have been put in the liners, and crushed ice to keep it cool was put in the main bodies of the pails. The covers have raised galleried sides which allowed them to be packed with ice as well. Ice-creams or sorbets were filled with fruit juices, chocolate or cream, and they were drunk in a semi-liquid state from small tasses ‘à glaces’.21

After the fire at the Winter Palace on 17th December 1837 a large number of pieces from the service (approximately 160) were looted. The stolen pieces passed via Ferdinando Civilotti to the London dealers Storr and Mortimer of 156 New Bond Street.22 Sèvres made 10 seaux ‘à glace’ for the service, and 7 of these were stolen during the Winter Palace fire and taken to London. By 20th July 1840 Viscount Lowther (1787-1872, later 2nd Earl of Londsdale, from 1844) had bought 129 or 130 pieces, and these were followed by a further 20 pieces by 21st July 1842. In 1856 Lord Lonsdale started selling various objects d’art at Christie’s, the same year that he also sold 156 of his Cameo Service pieces to the London dealer John Webb (keeping a small group of the Cameo Service pieces).23 In the same year the French Embassy notified the Russian Court that a London dealer had 156 pieces of the Cameo Service.24 The large group of pieces which John Webb sold to Richard Seymour-Conway, 4th Marquess of Hertford,25 included 5 seaux à‘glace’. Lord Hertford subsequently sold the majority of his pieces back to Tsar Alexander II of Russia in 1856-57,26 including one of his five seaux ‘à glace’, but he kept the best six pieces of the Cameo Service for himself, of which four were theseaux ‘à glace’ now in the Wallace Collection, London. Today there are four seaux ‘à glace’ in the Hermitage, one of which was returned by Lord Hertford.

It is less clear how the present two seaux ‘à glace’ passed from the Earl of Lonsdale’s collection to the collection of Octavius Edward Coope (1814-1886). Lord Lonsdale had a series of sales at Christie’s between 1856 and 1887, but these ice-pails do not appear in any of those auctions. Although it is possible that he sold them directly to Coope, it is more probable that he sold them to the dealer John Webb in 1856 along with all the other pieces, and that John Web sold five of the seaux ‘à glace’ to Lord Hertford and two of the seaux ‘à glace’ to Octavius Coope.

sev10

Watercolour design for the seau ‘à glace’, Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

PAINTERS AND GILDERS

The LG marks for Le Guay are almost certainly for Étienne-Henry Le Guay (l’aîné, or père, at the time these seauxwere being made), rather than Pierre-André Le Guay, who used a similar mark. Étienne-Henry Le Guay was initially a painter at Sèvres, but he then became a gilder, often working on friezes. Although one of these seaux ‘à glace’ bears a mark for Jean-Pierre Boulanger, also a gilder, the gilding of these seaux was carried out by Le Guay, as only his name appears in the records for gilding on this form in the service. This tallies with the fact that it was Le Guay who put his mark on the liners, which have gilt decoration only. Jean-Pierre Boulanger was a painter of patterns as well as being a gilder, and he was active at Sèvres from 1754 to 1785. François-Marie Barrat (oncle) was a flower painter active at Sèvres from 1769 to 1791, and from 1795 to 1796, and in 1779 he was the only artist recorded painting flowers on seaux ‘à glaces’ for the service.

The significance of the scratched # mark on the underside of one cover and scratched B on the other is unknown, and it is interesting to note that two of the four covers on the Wallace Collection examples also bear scratched marks (one is scratched with D, the other with XX). All ten ice-pails were given the final firings between 13th July 1778 and 29th March 1779.

1. Three of the four seaux à‘glace’ in the Wallace Collection are illustrated by Rosalind Savill, The Wallace Collection, catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain, London, 1988, Vol. II, pp. 773-775, Nos. C477, C478 and C479. Written before the fall of the Soviet Union, when access to information was limited, the catalogue erroneously records (on p. 773) 6 seaux ‘à glace’ in the Hermitage. There are 4 seaux à‘glace’ in the Hermitage, and one is illustrated by Nina Birioukova and Natalia Kazakevitch, La porcelaine de Sèvres du XVIII siècle, St. Petersburg, 2005, p. 140 (one of numbers nos. 322-325).
2. For a comprehensive listing of other pieces which have surfaced on the market and which are illustrated in the literature, see David Peters, Sèvres Plates and Services of the 18th century, Little Berkhamsted, 2005, Vol. III, pp. 604-606. An important sucrier from the service was sold by Christie’s Paris on 4 November 2015, lot 504.
3. See Susan Jaques, The Empress of Art: Catherine The Great and the Transformation of Russia, 2016, p. 145.
4. Cited by Susan Jaques, ibid., 2016, pp. 142-143, and Virginia Rounding, Catherine the Great: Love, Sex and Power,London, 2006, p. 275.
5. Grimm lived in Paris and they corresponded regularly. His letters kept her informed of literary gossip and events, as well as providing her with cultural contacts and advice. He even helped Catherine to find a wife for her son.
6. Cited by Jaques, ibid., p. 162 and Rounding, ibid., p. 325. This explains why Grimm referred to the service as ‘le service du prince Potemkin’ when he wrote to Catherine in 1781 telling her that he had purchased a Sèvres bust of her (of the same type found on the top of the centrepiece for the Cameo Service); see Rosalind Savill, ‘Cameo Fever: Six Pieces from the Sèvres Porcelain Dinner Service Made for Catherine II of Russia,’ Apollo Magazine, Vol. CXVI, No. 249, November 1982, p. 310 and p. 311, note 67.
7. See Savill, ibid., 1982, p. 304.
8. Only the ice-pails (seaux ‘à glaces’), the bottle-coolers (seaux ‘à bouteille’), the glass-coolers (seaux crénelés), the liqueur-bottle coolers (seaux à liqueur ovales) and the sugar-bowls, covers and stands (sucriers de table) have cut cameos.
9. Rosalind Savill, The Wallace Collection, catalogue of Sèvres Porcelain, London, 1988, Vol. II, p. 765, and p. 780, note 25.
10. As soft-paste was unstable during firing, the factory estimated it would need to fire 3,000 pieces in order to be left with 800 of sufficient quality. A new soft paste recipe was devised to minimise this, but there were still huge losses and costly delays. The revised soft-paste was glazed via a lengthy process; the glaze was formed from heating white sand, red lead and soda salt which fused when heated to form a lead glass. This was then ground to a fine powder and mixed with vinegar and chymie (a gum made from soap and animal glue). Two coats were applied and fired for forty-eight hours per coat. The turquoise ground was a copper-based enamel with an acid component which helped it to eat into the glassy surface and adhere. Two or three coats and firings were necessary for a good finish. See Savill, ibid., 1982, p. 306.
11. These were possibly supplied by Grandin who was paid 1,000 livres 'pour montures de pieces de porcelaine' in gilt copper in 1779. See Savill, ibid., 1988, Vol. II, p. 766 and p. 780, note 53.
12. A sheet printed with twelve classical heads (each with titles in reverse) is in the collection of Sèvres-Cité de la Céramique, and bears the inscription ‘Têtes imprimée avec de la couleur à porcelain tendre en 1777 ou 1778 service’. Although different from the transfer-printing technique introduced by Pierre Nicolas Berthevin (who had worked with this technique at Marieberg), it seems likely that Berthevin devised this particular technique for the Cameo Service before his death (see Savill, ibid., 1982, p. 306). Most of these outlined images were then painted by Jean Baptiste Etienne Genest. David Peters notes: ‘the merit, in terms of production, of employing transfers which are entirely overpainted is not obvious and it is not clear how a transfer could be usefully employed unless, at the least, a field of the basic enamel colour of a bust was in place even before application of the transfer and firing'. See Peters, ibid., Vol. III, p. 602.
13. The King’s approval for this suggestion was annotated in the margin of the memorandum. ‘...Et si le Roy daigne favoriser ce nouvel Etablissement dans sa manufacture en luy faisant communiquer successivement une partie des Pierres gravées du Cabinet de Sa majesté Le plus Riche quil y ait En Europe on pourra faire jouer le public amateur Et Curieux, des copies fidels de ces pretieux monumens qui ne sont Presque connus que par les description que les autheurs en ont donné Et par des Gravures imparfaites’. See Savill, ibid., 1982, p. 308 and note 42, and Savill, ibid., 1988, Vol. II, p. 765.
14. See Savill, ibid., 1988, Vol. II, p. 766.
15. The first volume of this work, François Arnaud, Description des principales pierres gravées du cabinet de S.A.S. Monseigneur le duc d'Orléans, was published in Paris by La Chau and Le Blond in 1780 (the second volume followed in 1784). The frontispiece and the vignette on p. 1 of the first volume, both of which are after Cochin, were engraved by Auguste de St. Aubin in 1778 and 1779 respectively, which is exactly the same time that these seaux à glaces were being made. The explanation for the p. 24 vignette is listed as: ‘Médaille d’or d’Alexandre fils de Néoptolème, sur laquelle est représentée une tête de Jupiter Dodonéen d’un travail exquis: la même tête a été gravée à Londres part M. Bartolozzi d’apres une médaille d’or du Cabinet de M. Duane. A des branches de chêne, Attribut de Jupiter Dodonéen, est suspendue une autre médaille de la ville d’Halicarnasse, publiée par Vaillant’. Auguste de St. Aubin was appointed the official engraver at the Bibliothèque Royale in 1766.
16. A note by Riocreux in the Sèvres archives suggests that he was responsible; see Savill, ibid., 1988, Vol. II, p. 763 and p. 780, note 14.
17. A document in the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris records this, see Peters, ibid., Vol. III, p. 602.
18. Cited by Jaques, ibid., 2016, pp. 165.
19. See Jaques, ibid., 2016, p. 166.
20. See Savill, ibid., 1988, Vol. II, p. 767 and p. 781, notes 68 and 69.
21. See Savill, ibid., 1988, Vol. II, p. 773.
22. See Savill, ibid., November 1982, p. 310.
23. Lord Lonsdale’s sales at Christie’s were on 30th May 1856, 11th March 1859, 16th July 1879 and 13-18th June 1887. Savill notes that the small group of Cameo Service pieces that he did not sell to the dealer John Webb appear in his posthumous 1887 sale. The present seaux ‘à glace’ do not appear in any of these sales. As Peters notes (ibid., pp. 603-4), the 156 pieces that Webb bought from Lord Lonsdale may not have been listed in the same manner as previously, which could have interfered with the numbers of pieces recorded.
24. Nina Birioukova and Natalia Kazakevitch, ibid., 2005, p. 151.
25. See Savill, ibid., 1982, p. 310, where she discusses the bill (from Webb to the 4th Marquess of Hertford) preserved in the Wallace Collection archive.
26. This group was previously thought to have been bought back by two different Tsars, but a 9th February 1857 instruction for payment ‘for part of the Sèvres porcelain service bought from Mr Webbs and bearing the monogram of the Empress Catherine II’ confirms its return at this time. See Savill, ibid., 1988, Vol. II, p. 767 and p. 781, note 76.

kom1

kom2

kom3

Lot 314. A Pair Of Japanese Inlaid Iron Vases And Covers From The Komai Workshop, Komai Of Kyoto, Each signed Kyoto ju Komai sei [made by Komai of Kyoto], Meiji period (late 19th century). Estimate £180,000 - £250,000 ($233,280 - $324,000). Price Realized £302,500 ($392,040) (€353,320). WORLD RECORD FOR A KOMAI STUDIO. Photo Christie's Image Ltd 2016.

Each of ovoid form, inlaid in gold, silver, shibuichi (silver alloy) and shakudo (gold and copper alloy) nunomezogan(fine damascene work), hirazogan (flat inlay) and takazogan (inlay in relief) with karako [Chinese boys] playing before shaped panels depicting various designs including landscapes, flowers and geometric patterns, the shoulder with a band of peony and karakusa [scrolling grass] and a lappet collar with geometric design, the foot with a band of grape vine, the domed covers similarly decorated with overlapping stylised petals containing geometric designs and spiral bands, the finials with a dot design, silver rims; signed on the sides; 17 in. (43 cm.) high each

Notes: In the past half century the importance of Meiji arts has once again been recognised. It is now accepted that the quality of the finest Japanese decorative metalwork made in the Meiji period (1868-1912) will never be attained again.

JAPAN: FROM ISOLATION TO THE WORLD STAGE
The large scale export of Japanese art in the last part of the 19th century was largely due to the need for Japan to compete in international trade. That need resulted in an enormous joint endeavour throughout the nation to present Japanese excellence to the outside world. So while the imported technologies of the Industrial Revolution were still being steadily absorbed, Japan relied greatly on sale of her art for income. Meiji Japan has been described as being a nation in its own right, rather than just a period in Japanese history, since there was such a sudden and far-reaching change in society. In simple terms, before 1868 Japan was a feudal culture ruled by the samurai class, and with a technology of medieval times. Then within just a few years of the Imperial Restoration Japan had an educational system to rival any other nation; railways, the telephone, modern (at the time) manufacturing machinery, and a growing modern industrialisation. The first general showing of Japanese crafts in the West had been in 1862 in London at the second International Exposition, which was followed by an Exhibition of the finest of Japanese arts and crafts in Paris in 1867, a year before the Meiji Restoration. This drew such a public following that things Japanese were to have an immediate and great impact on the arts in general, and a leading influence in the 'Art Nouveau' movement. The Emperor Meiji encouraged the arts and crafts, and he personally bought pieces at a series of Japanese Internal Industrial Fairs. Japan's art was exhibited at many International Fairs and many metal artists, like Komai, won prestigious awards.

THE KOMAI WORKSHOP
One of the most characteristic types of the new Meiji period metalwork is that of the Komai family of Kyoto, who made this pair of vases with their highly detailed damascene work. The Komai workshop is believed to have been founded in 1841, but it was only when Komai Otojiro I became its head, in 1865, that the company began to make the wares for which they were to become so famous. The workshop, under his leadership specialised in intricate inlaid work of gold and silver into iron. In a promotional brochure of about 1915 his son, Komai Otojiro II (his father having retired in 1906) called his workshop the ‘pioneer of damascene work’ and describes the process of the lacquering of the characteristic black ground, which required kiln firing and burnishing.

kom4

The Komai workshop, circa 1915.

kom4

A trade label for the Komai workshop, circa 1900.

THE TECHNIQUES OF METAL INLAY
Besides the bronze and iron casting traditions in Japan there was the sculpture and inlay of soft metals and their coloured alloys, whose techniques and designs developed from the manufacture of metal fittings for the swords of the samurai.
The metals used were copper, bronze, and brass, with gold and silver and their alloys with copper to form shibuichi (an alloy of copper with one fourth part silver which patinates to a range of silvers, greys, and browns) and shakudo(copper with up to five percent gold which patinates to bluish, brownish, or deep dark black). There was inlay in high relief, and level inlay by inlaying soft metal into recesses carved in the body of the piece which might be iron or bronze, or other copper alloy. There was the so-called nunomezogan (fine damascene work like textile) by which gold or silver leaf was pressed into a hatchwork of lines scored into the ground of the object. This technique was used especially on iron objects like the barrels of matchlock guns, stirrups, plate armour, or iron tsuba (sword guards) which were often richly inlaid with gold or silver.

THE DECORATION
The Komai style developed with an increasingly pictorial central motif on a background of both geometric patterns and free illustrations of nature, life, and landscapes with elaborate repeating borders. Most of these central motifs illustrate stories from Japanese history or mythology, and the Komai family retains a number of design books in which can be found drawings for many of their works.
The central motif on these present vases are of course the karako, or 'Chinese children'. Karako are always depicted together with peonies on paintings, lacquer and ceramics chasing dragonflies or butterflies, and playing with balls called temari, traditionally made from scraps of old clothing packed tight and decorated overall with bands of brightly-coloured thread. These treasures were traditionally made as gifts for children at the New Year. The karako are sometimes also shown in the company of popular auspicious deities.
On this extravagant pair of vases a number of karako are shown having clambered up open fences to enter a playground world of their own quite confusing to the viewer. In the lower part of the composition on both vases a number of giant temari balls bounce around on a ground of textile patterns. One brave child has reached the pinnacle of a fence post and is stretching out towards another group on the other jar of the pair. An enterprising karako in this second group has somehow acquired a ladder, and is close to achieving the object of reaching a butterfly using ribbons tied to a wand while his companions look on. Another boy on a lower rail of the fence looks intently down towards a further butterfly rendered almost invisible among the inlaid background lines of gold inlay. On the back of the jar akarako is hanging upside-down from a rail having reached for a ball and losing his cap in the attempt. On the back of the other jar a confident boy is settling onto a bridge somehow formed from one of the long paths of folded textile-like flowing paths which make up the extraordinary world of the karako intent on a ball which has been caught against the fence. The boys all seem oblivious to the worldly scenes depicted far below them, of ships at sea, and all around the distant houses, pavilions, and temples on the black Komai ground of our reality. Among the array of different patterns are to be found fruiting vines, birds, insects, phoenix, dragon-flies, seasonal flowers, auspicious symbols, Takasagao, the 'Island of Immortality', and various brocade patterns.
The adult viewer, while becoming engrossed with the activities of the karako, will find it challenging to grasp the relation between their fantastic playground and our ordered world glimpsed here and there against the black background. With these vases the Komai studio have made a serious intellectual point about the nature of perception and left us with an amusing and challenging mind puzzle in one of the finest examples of Meiji period (1868-1912) decorative art to be found.

Christie's is grateful to Victor Harris, Keeper Emeritus of Japanese Antiquities, The British Museum, for preparing the catalogue entry.

Latest Images