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Lot Essay
A label on the underside notes: Brimo de L[aroussilhe] 500,000 [FrFr] en 1919 (acheté par Brimo en Espagne 2,500 dollars (frs 37,900 en [19]32).
This bottle is one of a small number of vessels with figural scenes which were made at the end of the 16th century. From the first half of the sixteenth century it was the three-dimensional forms of larger vessels such as mugs and the present bottle that were more suited to these designs of one animal chasing another rather than the fixed circular centre of a dish.
The artist who worked on this bottle has a very individual style. His favourite animals are a deer with long legs whose chest has a strang grouping of curves, a lion or dog looking worriedly over its shoulder, and a running happy rabbit whose eye is set completely into the top of its head. These precise features can be seen on a small number of other vessels on which he can therefore have been shown to have worked. One is a mug with sloping sides in the Union centrale des Arts Decoratifs, Paris (Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby: Iznik, the Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, London, 1989, no.616, p.276; what appears to be the same mug but shown from the other side is illustrated by Katarina Otto-Dorn as being in the Topkapi (Türkische Keramik, Ankara, 1957, pl.81). A second is a jug in the Musée National de la Renaissance (Marthe Bernus-Taylor: Arabesques et Jardins de Paradis, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1990, no.133, p.162). There are also three dishes in the Ashmolean Museum, in the David Collection, (Atasoy and Raby: op.cit, pls.546 and 548, p.257), and in the Gulbenkian (Maria Queiroz Ribeiro: Iznik Pottery, Lisbon, 1996, no.87, pp.246-7). Looking at all the dishes with dense animals together however one cannot help wondering if not just those identified above, but in reality the majority of the entire group were done by the same artist, with the slight differences accounted for by a development in his style over time. The number of vessels surviving would easily be possible as the product of one man.
This bottle is one of a small number of vessels with figural scenes which were made at the end of the 16th century. From the first half of the sixteenth century it was the three-dimensional forms of larger vessels such as mugs and the present bottle that were more suited to these designs of one animal chasing another rather than the fixed circular centre of a dish.
The artist who worked on this bottle has a very individual style. His favourite animals are a deer with long legs whose chest has a strang grouping of curves, a lion or dog looking worriedly over its shoulder, and a running happy rabbit whose eye is set completely into the top of its head. These precise features can be seen on a small number of other vessels on which he can therefore have been shown to have worked. One is a mug with sloping sides in the Union centrale des Arts Decoratifs, Paris (Nurhan Atasoy and Julian Raby: Iznik, the Pottery of Ottoman Turkey, London, 1989, no.616, p.276; what appears to be the same mug but shown from the other side is illustrated by Katarina Otto-Dorn as being in the Topkapi (Türkische Keramik, Ankara, 1957, pl.81). A second is a jug in the Musée National de la Renaissance (Marthe Bernus-Taylor: Arabesques et Jardins de Paradis, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1990, no.133, p.162). There are also three dishes in the Ashmolean Museum, in the David Collection, (Atasoy and Raby: op.cit, pls.546 and 548, p.257), and in the Gulbenkian (Maria Queiroz Ribeiro: Iznik Pottery, Lisbon, 1996, no.87, pp.246-7). Looking at all the dishes with dense animals together however one cannot help wondering if not just those identified above, but in reality the majority of the entire group were done by the same artist, with the slight differences accounted for by a development in his style over time. The number of vessels surviving would easily be possible as the product of one man.