AN ENAMELLED GOLD POWDER-FLASK

EARLY 17TH CENTURY AND LATER

Details

AN ENAMELLED GOLD POWDER-FLASK
Early 17th Century and later
With circular body forming a gold frame decorated with green and white champlev enamel, securing foil-backed mail en rsille glass panels, those on the front and back comprising a convex border of panels decorated with strapwork and floral motifs with dragonflies and divided by six applied enamelled gold straps, in the centre a flat circular panel with a scene of a horseman in late sixteenth-century costume killing a hind with a sword, in a wooded landscape with an attendant armed with a spear, hounds and a stag, around the sides hounds and animals of the chase divided by applied enamelled gold straps, the colours gold, white, green, yellow and blue against a green ground, tapering spout with champlev enamel flowers, enamelled lever cut-off (spring incomplete) set with a green cabochon beryl, and two enamelled suspension rings carrying a cord of woven silk and gold thread (slight damage to enamel)
4 in. (10.9 cm.) diam.

Provenance

Rothschild inv. no. AR2484.

Exhibited

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. no. A 2279, from 1967.

Sale room notice

In our opinion this lot is largely 19th century.

Lot Essay

This is an example of the enamelling technique known as mail en rsille sur verre, which involves engraving a design on glass in low intaglio, lining the hollow reliefs thus formed with very thin gold foil, and, finally, filling them with powdered enamel that fuses at a lower temperature than the glass ground when fired (see J. Evans, A History of Jewellery, London, 1970, pp. 127-8; A. Somers Cocks and C. Truman, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Renaissance Jewels, Gold Boxes and Objets de Vertu, New York, 1984, pp. 92-95).

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