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Lot Essay
ADAM'S 'VASE-COLUMBARIUM STYLE'
Ewers such as the present pair, candle-vases, perfume-burners and other objets d'art were executed using blue john from Castleton, Derbyshire and embellished with French-fashioned 'ormolu' to adorn chimney-piece and table garnitures for rooms decorated in the George III antique manner. With their festive satyr-headed tapering bodies, these ewers reflect the 'vase columbarium' style of interior decoration promoted by The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, London, 1773, under the influence of the Italian antiquarian, author and architect G.B. Piranesi (d.1778).
George III's Rome-trained court architect, Robert Adam followed in the wake of the artist architect James 'Athenian' Stuart (d. 1788) when he introduced ewer-vases as ornamental furniture evoking 'sacrifices at love's altar in antiquity' in his 1760 design for Lady Scarsdale's ewer-decked bookcase ('The Kedleston Bookcase', sold by the late Viscount Scarsdale and The Curzon Family, Christie's, London, 9 June 2005, lot 292, £1,464,000 sold after sale).
FROM GRECIAN EWERS TO BOULTON'S FRENCH-FASHIONED AIGUIERES Enthusiasm for decorative ewers was also popularised by Josiah Wedgwood's late 1760s establishment of his Etruria Works, where he manufactured Grecian ewers following Baron d'Hancarville's publication of Sir William Hamilton's collection of vases in A Catalogue of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1766-7. However, it was not until 1772 that the Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton decided to follow suit in the manufacture of 'blue john' ewers. It was during his successful London sales held at James Christie's Great Rooms that year that he received a request from Sir Harbord Harbord, later Baron Suffield for 'I pair of ures such as are proper for the gods to drink nectar'. Such a ewer garniture accompanied his purchase of one of Boulton's French-fashioned 'Venus' clocks (N. Goodison, Matthew Boulton: Ormolu, Op.cit, p. 415). The latter figured the goddess of love attending the urn-capped 'altar' commemorating her love Adonis, and derived from Sayer's Compleat Drawing Book, which featured a French engraving illustrating a scene from the ancient poets' History of Venus and Adonis. While the clock provided an appropriate Vanitas adornment for Lady Harbord's Dressing Apartment, the pattern for the accompanying ewers appears to have derived from an engraving of a Renaissance bronze ewer such as that displayed in Venice's Museo (now Palazzo) Grimani (W. Rieder & S. Walker (eds.), Vasemania: Neoclassical Form and Ornament in Europe, New Haven and London, 2005, p.89). Boulton's design for a ewer is in his Pattern Book, I, p. 83 and illustrated here. The design is virtually identical to the present pair of ewers except for the foliage at the top of the socle and a guilloche band running across the centre of the vase, neither of which elements are found on the other recorded examples.
RECORDED EXAMPLES OF EWERS BY BOULTON
Seven recorded examples of this model exist:
1 & 2: the present lot.
3 & 4: The pair of ewers formerly in the collection of the late Sir Arthur Gilbert until sold for the benefit of the Gilbert Collection at Somerset House, Christie's, London, 8 June 2006, lot 70 (£243,200) now in a private collection.
5 & 6: Ewers in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Soho House.
7: A single ewer in an English historic private collection [illustrated in N. Goodison, 'Matthew Boulton's Ornamental Ormolu', Discovering Antiques, no. 48, September 1971, p. 1136, fig. 6].
Ewers such as the present pair, candle-vases, perfume-burners and other objets d'art were executed using blue john from Castleton, Derbyshire and embellished with French-fashioned 'ormolu' to adorn chimney-piece and table garnitures for rooms decorated in the George III antique manner. With their festive satyr-headed tapering bodies, these ewers reflect the 'vase columbarium' style of interior decoration promoted by The Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, London, 1773, under the influence of the Italian antiquarian, author and architect G.B. Piranesi (d.1778).
George III's Rome-trained court architect, Robert Adam followed in the wake of the artist architect James 'Athenian' Stuart (d. 1788) when he introduced ewer-vases as ornamental furniture evoking 'sacrifices at love's altar in antiquity' in his 1760 design for Lady Scarsdale's ewer-decked bookcase ('The Kedleston Bookcase', sold by the late Viscount Scarsdale and The Curzon Family, Christie's, London, 9 June 2005, lot 292, £1,464,000 sold after sale).
FROM GRECIAN EWERS TO BOULTON'S FRENCH-FASHIONED AIGUIERES Enthusiasm for decorative ewers was also popularised by Josiah Wedgwood's late 1760s establishment of his Etruria Works, where he manufactured Grecian ewers following Baron d'Hancarville's publication of Sir William Hamilton's collection of vases in A Catalogue of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1766-7. However, it was not until 1772 that the Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton decided to follow suit in the manufacture of 'blue john' ewers. It was during his successful London sales held at James Christie's Great Rooms that year that he received a request from Sir Harbord Harbord, later Baron Suffield for 'I pair of ures such as are proper for the gods to drink nectar'. Such a ewer garniture accompanied his purchase of one of Boulton's French-fashioned 'Venus' clocks (N. Goodison, Matthew Boulton: Ormolu, Op.cit, p. 415). The latter figured the goddess of love attending the urn-capped 'altar' commemorating her love Adonis, and derived from Sayer's Compleat Drawing Book, which featured a French engraving illustrating a scene from the ancient poets' History of Venus and Adonis. While the clock provided an appropriate Vanitas adornment for Lady Harbord's Dressing Apartment, the pattern for the accompanying ewers appears to have derived from an engraving of a Renaissance bronze ewer such as that displayed in Venice's Museo (now Palazzo) Grimani (W. Rieder & S. Walker (eds.), Vasemania: Neoclassical Form and Ornament in Europe, New Haven and London, 2005, p.89). Boulton's design for a ewer is in his Pattern Book, I, p. 83 and illustrated here. The design is virtually identical to the present pair of ewers except for the foliage at the top of the socle and a guilloche band running across the centre of the vase, neither of which elements are found on the other recorded examples.
RECORDED EXAMPLES OF EWERS BY BOULTON
Seven recorded examples of this model exist:
1 & 2: the present lot.
3 & 4: The pair of ewers formerly in the collection of the late Sir Arthur Gilbert until sold for the benefit of the Gilbert Collection at Somerset House, Christie's, London, 8 June 2006, lot 70 (£243,200) now in a private collection.
5 & 6: Ewers in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Soho House.
7: A single ewer in an English historic private collection [illustrated in N. Goodison, 'Matthew Boulton's Ornamental Ormolu', Discovering Antiques, no. 48, September 1971, p. 1136, fig. 6].