A Collection of Silver-Gilt Mounted Porcelains

The glorious Howzer Cup, a masterpiece of craftsmanship, consists of a Chinese brush pot, ca. 1630-50, mounted in England, ca. 1660-70, probably by the Swiss goldsmith Wolfgang Howzer. I especially love the hounds on the lid and handles. Image courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Today, with the help of the venerable V & A Museum Collection, I have assembled for you a collection of beautiful Chinese and Japanese porcelains, all featuring silver gilt mounts. Just imagine how exotic these porcelains would have seemed to 16th century Europeans. Asian porcelain pieces decorated with underglaze blue began to arrive in England in the 1560s, amid great speculation as to the nature of the mysterious material. Some people speculated that it was a precious stone, or perhaps made from crushed sea shells. Understandably, the owners of such high-status objects went to great trouble to enhance the value of their porcelains even more by commissioning elaborate silver-gilt mounts for them. I suppose when we take great care in framing an important painting, we continue this tradition in some small way. 

A Japanese Imari cup, mounted in France ca. 1720. This is the watercolor illustration I did for September, from our 2013 desk calendar. From the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection.

Asian porcelains were also enormously popular in France. When Siamese ambassadors visited Versailles in 1686, King Louis XVI himself received the delegation, and fueled a fever for all things Asian, bringing porcelains like the Japanese Imari piece above to the height of fashion. 

A Chinese ewer, ca. 1560-86 with later English silver-gilt mounts.
Image courtesy the V & A Museum.

Asian porcelain was so sought after in Europe, that objects of lesser quality, like the one above, were treated to the same gilt-mounting treatment as finer pieces. Porcelains like this ewer were made in large quantities in the southern city of Jingdezhen for local use and export alike. In 1557, according to the V & A, the Portuguese began to deal in porcelain in Macau, and although the vast majority of pieces went to Lisbon, the English pirates did what they could to increase the flow of these objects to England. The ewer may be rustic, but it still has a certain charm, don't you think?

The Trenchard bowl, Chinese porcelain
painted in underglaze blue, with English silver-gilt mounts.
Image courtesy the V & A Museum.

The Trenchard bowl, shown above, was featured in our 2011 calendar, and has an interesting history. From the V & A: "By tradition this bowl was a gift from Philip the Fair, Duke of Burgundy (1478-1506) and his wife Joanna 'the Mad' to Sir Thomas Trenchard of Wolverton, Dorset, in gratitude for his hospitality after their ship was wrecked off Weymouth in 1506. In fact, we can tell from the date of the mounts and of the porcelain that it reached England much later, during Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603), probably as part of a load of porcelain seized from a Spanish ship." 

A Chinese porcelain cup, ca. 1573-85, with later English mounts, marked 1585.
Image courtesy the V & A Museum.

Having trained as a metalsmith, I'm amazed by the ingenious buckle-like mechanisms used to attach these fanciful metal armatures to the delicate porcelains. Like the exotic natural crystals, coconut shells and sea shells that were similarly "enhanced", these pieces of porcelain would certainly have made impressive additions to cabinets of curiosities. Wouldn't it have been wonderful to have been there to see them?! 

Walpole's Sugar Bowl

 

 I painted this illustration of a Sèvres 1758 sugar basin for the Parvum Opus 2013 desk calendar.
Reading about it's owner, Horace Walpole has been such fun.
Image Copyright Parvum Opus.

What began as a simple bit of research into the history of a small 18^th century French sugar basin has instead led me to an entertaining discovery. It would have been enough to talk about the venerable history of the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, and of the exquisite bird paintings of Étienne Evans. In this particular case, however, provenance wins out, because this little sugar basin was purchased by none other than Horace Walpole on a trip to Paris in 1765-6.

The companion jug from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection.

Before we get carried away, a bit about the sugar basin itself. From the Victoria and Albert Museum, where this piece lives now, we learn that “This sugar bowl and its companion jug are from a tea service with a matching tray. Such sets are known as 'cabarets' in Britain, where they were usually for one or two people, and as déjeuners in France, where they were sometimes equipped with four cups. Eighteenth-century accounts of tea drinking in France indicate that the tea was made very strong in a small pot, and then diluted with hot water before being drunk. Tea was drunk with hot or cold milk and sweetened with white sugar. It is unlikely, however, that these pieces were ever used by Horace Walpole, their first owner, for anything other than display.”

Horace Walpole, by John Giles Eccardt, ca. 1755
Image courtesy Wikipedia.

Horatio Walpole, 4^th Earl of Orford was born on 24 September, 1717. He was the son of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole and a cousin of Admiral Lord Nelson. Although he was an art historian and Whig politician, he is widely remembered for Strawberry Hill, his neo Gothic creation in Twickenham.

Strawberry Hill as it appeared after the 2012 restoration.
Image courtesy Wikipedia.

The structure of the house was inspired by Gothic masterpieces including Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, and like those inspirational buildings, Strawberry Hill evolved over a long period-- thirty years in this case.

Joseph Constantine Stadler, after Joseph Farington, Strawberry Hill (South Front),
1793, aquatint with hand coloring, The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Most fascinating for me are Walpole’s extensive collections, which filled and defined the interior of Strawberry Hill. The interiors were said to be “settings of Gothic ‘gloomth’ for Walpole’s collection.” (Calloway, Stephen, Snodin, Michael, and Wainwright, Clive, Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill, Orleans House Gallery, Richmond upon Thames, 1980.) Gloomth—what a fantastically descriptive term! Walpole’s collections of art, antiquarian objects and curiosities were well known to his contemporaries and detailed in his publication, A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill.

John Carter, View from the Hall at Strawberry Hill, 1788, pen and ink, and watercolour on laid paper, from Horace Walpole’s extra-illustrated copy of A Description of the Villa…at Strawberry-Hill (Strawberry Hill, 1784). The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
* The blue-tinted area signifies a piece of art further described on the Library's database.

According the the V&A: “On [his 1765 trip to Paris] he spent more than £400 on porcelain and confessed that he bought china faster than he could pay for it. Walpole purchased these pieces some years after they were made, so he probably bought them from the stock of a Paris dealer, rather than as new pieces from the [Sèvres] factory. Continental porcelain could not be legally imported to Britain until 1775 unless it was declared to be for private use and not for sale.”

John Carter, Great North Bed-Chamber, n.d., watercolour and ink, from Horace Walpole,
A Description of the Villa…at Strawberry-Hill (Strawberry Hill, 1784).
This is the room in which the Sèvres breakfast set was displayed.
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 
* The blue-tinted area signifies a piece of art further described on the Library's database.

My search into the history of this small sugar basin led me to a wonderful discovery: The Lewis Walpole Library of Yale University. There, interested parties can explore a database which includes not only details about Walpole’s entire collection of art and objects, but also detailed descriptions and images of each room in Strawberry Hill. 

John Carter, ‘Holbien Chamber,” c.1788, watercolor with wash-line mount, from Horace Walpole,
A Description of the Villa…at Strawberry-Hill (Strawberry Hill, 1784).
The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 
* The blue-tinted area signifies pieces of art further described on the Library's database.

From the Library’s home page: “Dispersed since the famous house sale in 1842, Walpole’s collection was one of the most significant in eighteenth-century Britain, numbering several thousand items. This database encompasses the entire range of art and artifacts from Walpole’s collections, including all items whose location is currently known and those as yet untraced but known through a variety of historical records.” How wonderful that this project has been undertaken—it’s a truly impressive archive, and one I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Equally wonderful has been the circuitous path that led me from a French sugar bowl, to the biography of Walpole, to a splendid treasure trove of art and antiquarian objects.

Elias Geyer's Navy: Fantastical Sea Shell and Silver Drinking Vessels of the 16th and 17th Centuries

Poseidon astride a seahorse, nautilus with jeweled silver gilt mounts,
Elias Geyer, Leipzig, ca. 1590
Copyright Parvum Opus

First, please allow me to beg forgiveness for my extended absence and warmly welcome you back to the Parvum Opus blog! It has been a whirlwind of a spring, with an over-full schedule of fascinating work at the bindery, and a chain of happy family events. I've missed our wonderful conversations and am so happy to return to a more normal schedule now. I can't wait to see what my favorite bloggers have been up to over these past few weeks... 

We are, shockingly, half way through the month of June, and I haven't yet shared the interesting  history of the gilt-mounted nautilus shell that I chose to paint for our calendar this month. The piece shown above was created by Elias Geyer in Leipzig around 1590. A well respected metalsmith at the time, he imagined and fabricated a flotilla of fantastical creatures like sea horses and unicorns with heads and upper bodies executed in jeweled and gilt silver, and hindparts made from exquisitely large turban snail shells. 

A pair of Geyer's sea horse drinking vessels: the cup opens via a hinge at the edge where the sea horse
body and shell meet. Courtesy of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest.
Copyright ArsDecorativa.

An Elias Geyer drinking vessel in the form of a basilisk, ca. 1600.
From the collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

In the course of researching this very interesting class of objects, I came across an acquisition proposal written by Dr. Eike D. Schmidt of the Minneapolis Institute of arts. Here is his description of the cultural conditions that produced such fanciful works: 

"From the end of the 16th century, Nautilus shells from the Indo-Pacific Ocean were imported into Europe on a regular basis, where they were admired for their exotic origins and geometric perfection. The fact that their interior chambers follow a logarithmic spiral was interpreted in early modern thought as evidence for the theory that nature from its greatest manifestations (macrocosm) to its smallest details (microcosm) follows a thorough plan. They were seen as proof of the convergence of the bodily and spiritual worlds... and often ultimately of the existence of God. Whereas a few nautilus shells were made into liturgical objects (incense burners), the vast majority were mounted as secular drinking vessels by, generally, outfitting them with mounts of silver, gilt silver and gold figures alluding to the Sea or the element of water (as the nautilus’s original habitat). Silver-mounted nautilus shells were among the most characteristic products of the famous gold- and silversmithing workshops of Augsburg and Nuremberg in Southern Germany and were sought after by collectors all over Europe."

Another Geyer drinking vessel, this time in the form of a griffin bearing a halberd.
From the collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.

Dr. Schmidt  continues: "Nautilus cups were (and continue to be) among the most prestigious trophy objects within silver collections, and as such they were frequently represented in still life

paintings, such as those by Willem Claesz. Heda (Dutch, 1594 – c. 1670). But they are

particularly representative of the objects collected in the Renaissance ‘cabinets of curiosities,’ a type of collection, which is an important forerunner of the modern museum as an institution. Striving to put together the rarest and most exotic, wondrous products of nature with the most astonishing accomplishments of human inventiveness and dexterity, that is of naturalia and artificialia as they were called at the time, princes and the richest merchants of the 16th and 17th centuries put together the first large collections of zoological, botanical, and mineralogical specimens blended with the most exquisite works of art. These “cabinets of curiosities” were also known as Kunst- und Wunderkammern (“chambers of art and wonder”). They first emerged in the territory of the Holy Roman Empire and in central Europe, before spreading throughout the remainder of the continent. By combining natura and artificium in a single work, Nautilus cups can be seen as pars pro toto ["a part (taken) for the whole"] embodiments of the very concept of collecting that informed the “cabinets of curiosities” at large."

If you'd like to read more about these works, I've included a link to a 2005 New York Times article, "When fantastical trumps function", by Souren Melikian.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/arts/07iht-melik8.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Still Life with Nautilus, attributed to Willem Claesz Heda.
Courtesy of Wikipedia.