BOONTON, N.J. – Estimated at $2,500-$3,500, this micromosaic plaque depicting the Rape of Europa hammered for $13,000 and sold for $16,250 with buyer’s premium as part of Millea Bros.‘ three-day sale on November 15-17.
Dated circa 1820, the central scene, depicting the Phoenician princess’s abduction by Zeus, is one based on Michelangelo Maestri’s influential series of gouache drawings of the frescoes of Pompeii. The painstaking and meticulous decoration is probably from the workshop of the virtuoso Antonio Aguatti. Considered the most talented mosaicist of his time, in 1810 his work was awarded a gold medal at the Capitoline exhibition of Roman Works of Art and Industry, held at the Campidoglio, and from 1832 until his death in 1846 he was professor of ‘mosaico in piccolo’ at the Vatican workshops.
Aguatti based his distinctive palette of glass tesserae – bold reds, blues and yellows set against a contrasting white ground – on the frescoes uncovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the 18th century.
GLENVIEW, Ill. – For René Lalique, glass-making represented a second career. He had already proved himself a superb artist-jeweler but, as the fashion for Art Nouveau peaked, Lalique changed mediums and began to produce bespoke glass bottles for a near neighbor on the Place Vendôme in Paris. The bottles he made for François Coty are some of the very first experiments in commercial perfume bottle manufacture.
Perfume bottles remained an important part of his range into the 1920 and 1930s. The sale at Meadow Lane Auctions on November 19 included several examples, among them a Bouquet de Faunes bottle made circa 1925 for Guerlian. There are multiple versions of this bottle, including a later issue from the post-war era, but this was an early example and in splendid condition. It came sealed with the original paper label to the stopper and the original packaging still intact. Hard to find a better example, it hammered for $6,000 and sold for $7,500 with buyer’s premium against an estimate of $200-$500.
Estimated at $800-$1,200, hammered at $12,000 and sold for $15,000 with buyer’s premium was a rare bottle from the Lalique factory line. The Satyre, issued circa 1933, has an elongated stopper decorated as a mythological figure with a long beard and horns. Model No. 527 in the Felix Marcilhac’s Lalique catalogue raisonné, this is a bottle that has sold for close to $20,000 in previous auctions.
LONDON – Although originally training as a goldsmith, Dirck Van Rijswijck (1596-1679) developed his own characteristic style using less rarefied material. While working in Antwerp, he perfected an idiosyncratic technique using engraved mother-of-pearl, bone and hardstone inlays to create floral still life subjects. The natural variations in the shell and stone were used to suggest the colors and surface textures of the various flowers.
These Baroque curiosities are rare at auction, but a fine example was offered by Bonhams as part of its November 21 sale of the single-owner collection of Cornelis Paulus van Pauwvliet. He collected for close to 50 years, furnishing an Amsterdam home just a stone’s throw from the Rijksmuseum, with English and Dutch works of art from the 17th century to the late 19th century.
Van Pauwvliet had bought this 6 by 4.5in (15 by 12cm) panel from London dealership Jeremy in the 1990s (it had previously sold at Sotheby’s in Monaco). Depicting a floral garland with a butterfly and a variegated stone tabletop with a dragonfly and a squirrel, it is signed and dated to the left-hand corner within a paper scroll reading Dirck Van Riswick, Invenit e Fecit, AD 1665.
One of many well-received items in the £2.86 million Pauwvliet sale, it was estimated at £12,000-£18,000, hammered for £40,000 and sold for £51,200 ($65,000) with buyer’s premium. As the item was brought into the U.K. from Holland for sale, import VAT (value-added tax) of 5% was due on the hammer price.
ST. PAUL, Minn. – This extraordinary Tiffany & Co. silver and mixed metal presentation cup has many of the characteristics of the firm’s chief designer and director of its silver works, Edward Chandler Moore (1827-1891). Similar pieces mixing a broad range of different decorative vocabularies were exhibited by Tiffany at international exhibitions in the last quarter of the 19th century. Moore was himself a great collector (he left his huge holdings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and he brought his deep knowledge of Islamic and Far Eastern design to bear on his work.
Dating from circa 1885, this 11in-tall and 83oz trophy combines the inlaying and patination techniques he had learned from Japanese metal-working with a form and geometric decoration borrowed from Pueblo pottery. The three naturalistic buffalo head and hoof legs decoration are a very much an addition characteristic of the Gilded Age.
To the gold-wash interior is the inscription Catharine Lorillard Wolfe To Clarence Cecil Pell Nov. 15th 1885 that documents its commission.
Catharine Wolfe (1828-1887), the daughter of a New York merchant and one of the heirs to the Lorillard Tobacco fortune, inherited $12 million (something close to $300 million in today’s money) in 1872. She combined art collecting with philanthropy and made two major bequests to the Met. Clarence Pell (1885-1964) of Newport, Rhode Island, who was evidently given this piece as a christening gift, was also a member of the Lorillard family, which sold cigarettes under the brand names Newport, Maverick, Old Gold, Kent, True, Satin, and Max.
The presentation cup appeared for sale in the capital of Minnesota on the first of two days of selling at Revere Auctions on November 14-15. With a clean bill of health – it had no dents, major scratches or signs of restoration – it was estimated at $5,000-$10,000, but found sufficient admirers to sell for $44,000 ($55,000 including buyer’s premium).
BRANFORD, Conn. – Malaria has been a plague on human populations for millennia, mostly transmitted through mosquito bites and resulting in terrible fevers, chills and occasionally death.
As a staunch prohibitionist, E. W. Grove was an unlikely patent medicine creator and salesman, as most so-called ‘cures’ of the day were largely alcoholic in nature. But his 1878 malarial treatment (and not ‘cure’), Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic, contained no alcohol, instead relying on a suspension of lemon-flavored syrup to mask the bitter taste of cinchonine, a derivative of quinine that involves alkaloids extracted from powered cinchona bark.
It was a huge seller and an internationally known product, and was even used by the British Army for malarial exposure in jungle climates. Grove’s advertising often relied on the anthropomorphic pig with a child’s head and the slogan “makes children & adults as fat as pigs,” perhaps in reference to the weight loss commonly suffered by malarial patients.
This early example of Grove advertising almost has a folk-art feel to it; later pig/child depictions are far more refined and standardized, dating this possibly to the late 1870s or early 1880s. Estimated at only $400-$800 at New England Auction – Fred Giampietro, floor and internet bidders battled all the way to a final hammer price of $6,500, or $8,320 with buyer’s premium, as part of the November 16 Collection of Peter Brams & Discovery Auction.
