Daum Vase-Piece of the Week

DAUM.

Founded by The Brothers Auguste and Antonin in the town of Nancy in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine.
They would create glassware of exceptional quality with varying techniques of finest workmanship that would, at times, rival the work of Galle.

The first Department of Art was created within the small family glassworks which would interpret the spirit of Art Nouveau.
They moved with the times through the Twenties and Thirties an evolution into a Art Deco style.


They would welcome in a new era in the 1950's and still make glasswares today.

100 years ago it was not just the case of expressing a new artform but aquiring the techniques to express it in glass. To imbue a feeling or a sincerity, the Daum Brothers wanted to make work that would outshine its rivals.

Works that would create an arousal, not only in the style but an understanding of the complexity of the piece, heightening the sense of achievement of the craftsman and designers collaboration.

Shape, Decoration, Colour and Material would be the four elements that would contribute to the organic processs that would be the hallmark of Art Nouveau.

Spirits of Autumn Summer and Winter would all be brought into play with hues and glows that conjure up a feeling inside each work of art.

It is as if they have been found on the floor of the forest rather than in a glasswork factory.

Its not as if you can go and get a recipe book. The artistic glassmaker would have to carry out his own experiments and write down the formula.

Lets as example think how would you obtain the exact colour, in glass for, lets say and Orchid or a Thistle head of a Cow Parsley.
 Or crisping leaves in autumnal differing grades of decay, of red and gold.

A few companies such as Appert of St Denis would supply Antonin Daum with some of his early supplies.

Often glassworkers would move companies or transfer to a different area and it was important to train the skilled workers of the future.

In 1925 Paul Daum refined and transformed the pallete.

Michel Daum would start working in lead crystal. After the Second World War the company would largely abandon glass in favour of lead crystal.

Between 1891 and 1914 3,000 different models appeared.

1920 to 1939 saw 2,000.

They won medals and honours, first prizes galore taking the official exhibitions extremely seriously in helping stimulate revenue through sales. Chicago 1893. Nancy and Lyon 1894. Brussels 1895 and 1897. There was a Legion of Honour for Auguste. In 1900 at the World Fair, like Galle, Daum were awarded a First Prize and Antonin a Legion D'Hounour.

Exhibitions at Ecole de Nancy the Pavillion de Marsan 1903 and Nancy itself in 1905 and 1908. Strasboug 1908 Paris and Brussels 1910. Then Gand 1913 and Lyon 1914. It just went on, and on. After the Great War they would show their style at the Paris Expostion des Art Decorative Et Industrial Moderne in 1925 moving into a more geometric and angular vision that would lend itseld to acid etching pattern.

This petite slimly bulbous vase is only 20cm high and is a yellowish base or pallette where the green hues of leaves blowing in the wind have been overlaid and carved back by wheel cutting. Several different colours of glass tinted by oxides can be seen to be applied to make up the overall effect. It is a painting in molton glass.

The base clearly displays the Daum Nancy mark and proudly proclaims the Cross of Lorraine as a symbol of defiance.

Alsace Lorraaine was lost to the Germans in 1870.during The Franco Prussian War.

Napoleon III had won Nice and Savoy in 1861 from Turin. It had been Italian.

Famous for Quiche Lorrane Alsation dogs, it was named Elsass Lothringen by the Germans. Many Road names are today still in German. There is a marker or two to the Magino line.

Bismark took it in 1871 This was one of the underlying causes of the First World War.

The first world war one charge was an attempt to take it back which they didn’t do till 1918.Germany took it again in 1940 The Germans re-uniting with the motherland of the German Reich. The French re occupation happened in 1944.

Antiques Roadshow 2016 Valuation Location Dates

There are some great venues for 2016 from a Scottish World Heritage Site to a Cornish Garden.

 2015 was a very good year with an average of six million people watching the show.

I had a great time as part of the Roadshow team in 2015.

2016 looks like being a very exciting year but we rely on the wonderful people who take the time to bring their treasured possessions along.

 Not forgetting the things that may not appear to have any value, that they may have found in a skip or that may have been in the loft for decades.







We are there to help people understand the items they bring along and hear the stories that are contained within,
 If you can get the chance to pop along to one of the beautiful historic venues you will be assured a great day out.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4BFprksgSjpvxsdCTwDFQlJ/roadshows-in-2016

PILKINGTON AND ALPHONSE MUCHA: THE 1900 PARIS EXHIBITION

Pilkington exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exhibition. 

This was probably the most influential event in its development of artistic products. 

William Burton took a small party of artists to show off products that include floor tiles, wall decorations, fireplaces with hearths both with low relief, raised outline and printed form.

Designs by Walter Crane, Frederick Shields, Lewis F. Day, C.F.A. Voysey, F.A. Steele and John Chambers made up the valuable cargo that crossed the channel.

 Wall mosaics were also shown as was pottery with glazes by William and Joseph Burton.

Its stand proudly proclaimed;

PILKINGTONS Tile and Pottery Co. Clifton Junction MANCHESTER.

The floors of the stand were tiled and the quatrafoiled columns that held up shallow Norman Arches were adorned with architectural exterior tiles. These were holding aloft corbels that were decorated with the Pilkingtons emblem proudly emblazoned in lustre, below a ceramic cornice.

The Senses, a series of panels by Walter Crane which were painted in slips by John chambers and were set, framed within architectural ceramic Ionic pilasters, and with its ceramic apron and cornice was a work of art within itself.

This enabled them not only to show their work but to compare themselves to competitors, and to get themselves acquainted with developments and trends in other parts of Europe.

The main development that came from this journey south into Europe was that they acquired the right of use for designs by Alphonse Mucha.

The Paris office of Pilkingtons revealed that they had the use of 20 designs a year but it is not clear just how many of Mucha's designs were in fact used.

At the 1901 Glasgow Exhibition four panels entitled Les Fleurs were shown.

A set of these also decorated the hall way of the Pilkington factory, they must have been highly prized until the 1940's when the factory was redesigned.

In Liverpool a massive tile panel was conceived by Pilkingtons  own artists made up of five large murals depicting pottery through the ages and photographic evidence remains at the factory and at the Walker Art gallery where it was installed. During World War II the building was badly damaged, though the tiles themselves remained intact they were destroyed when the remains of the building were demolished, no doubt to make way for a cafe.

Pilkingtons tiles were on the ill fated Titanic.

Rossetti painted maidens with eyes like pools.

He painted temptresses and beautiful damoselles, he painted beauties that he wanted to bed.

He was inspired by drugs and alcohol and he was mortified by criticism like a schoolboy would be.

He would let himself down badly by exhuming his wife corpse to retrieve a book of poetry that he had buried with her because he was so overcome with grief.

And then he was not.

His three main muse that he painted were from different backgrounds, one was a prostitute another a wife and the other a wife of one of his best friends, his forbidden love, Jane.

His father was a political radical who had to leave his home town because of his views and the failed uprising of his town in 1820.

He was born in London and took up the modern practice of the time, of being enticed into the past.

The past of Arthurian legends and great Knights doing great deeds by saving damsels in distress.

But he was the son of an exile and his father wanted to return to Italy to rejoin the revolution. He became frustrated.

He rebelled at the Royal academy lacking the patience to study and he joined, along with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais The Pre Raphaelites and they played out their Arthurian ideals. He was named after the doomed poet Dante.

With the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood the rules were simple.
To produce work, through a code of honour spelt out in their manifesto.
To have genuine ideas to express, to study nature, and to sympathise with what was heartfelt serious and direct in past art and produce good art and sculpture.

Before Raphael art is self expressing they proclaimed and they wanted to return to simple art. Flemish art would also inspire them and the fresco painters of the medieval past showed them the way to the future. Rossetti would cross Van Eyk with Botticelli in 'Behold the Handmaiden of the Lord'. The paint was thinly applied and full of symbolic meaning with its claustrophobic set up.

His ideals of women would take him on his own journey, but his critics did not care for the Pre Raphaelites flatness and Rossetti hated them and gave up this style.

Not surprising when you see 'The Childhood of the Virgin' by Rossetti, it is rife for ridicule because it is so average.

Charles Dickens mocked with the idea for a Pre-Gallileo society. Rossetti was paralysed by this sort of critique. The ongoing forces of progress would not stop and all around him the Brotherhood turned away to a purple idealism of romantic Teutonic knights emblazoned with colourful tunics that they reconstructed.

Yet they said they were Pre-Raphael.

Libby Siddel would define the look and Dante found Beatrice in her.
 She worked in a hat shop and modelled for another, for the famous depiction of Ophelia, which was detrimental to her health.

Rossetti wanted her for himself and while Gothic grew up all around him they withdrew into their own style.

His intimate drawings were like sonnets and his moralising scenes like 'Blackfriars Bridge' were contradictory .

“I am thoroughly indisposed to innumerate anyone's condition by means of pictures”.

Fanny Coalforth entered his life while out walking she flicked peanuts at him and she agreed to model for him. His work became erotic and sex became to sell.

“The mouth that had been kissed loses not its freshness as it renews itself as does the moon” he wrote on the back of 'Bocca Baciata' a picture he painted based around an old Italian tale of promiscuity.

He looked to the Renaissance for inspiration and he fed Lizzie with Opium and then married her in 1860. Their daughter was stillborn this haunted him for the rest of his life. He would hear ghostly footsteps from the depths of his soul. Noises from outside the door, footsteps of his daughter.

Lizzie was destroyed by the tragedy and she never recovered from an overdose of Laudanum.
 She never woke up.

In the coffin Rossetti placed the manuscript of his poems and he moved from Blackfriars to Chelsea. He suffered from Insomnia.
 He put together a menagerie with rabbits peacocks and wombats, and other unusual creatures. They regularly escaped. He continued to paint. Fanny became housekeeper model. Her loose hair infatuated him, her hair symbolised looseness and to the Victorians his work sold.

He painted 'Beata Beatrix' showing Lizzies movement from earth to heaven as Beatrice which he ladened with drug induced images that he was not comfortable with.

He painted other versions for his private patrons.

John Ruskin said the work was as course as the prostitutes who modelled for them.

Rossetti then began to write poetry and he wrestled with the fact that he had buried his poems and he then took the disgraceful turn when hired people to dig up Lizzies body and the dirty deed was badly done. He scraped his dirty little bunch of poems clean of putrefaction and put in disinfectant for weeks to quench the stench.
 In my opinion it was sick and unforgivable act, to do this unsettling and disrespectful thing to someone he had loved.

He was then selfishly, as usual, spurned on and was now inspired by Jane Morris.

now understood desire whether it be unrequited, and his expressions opened up through his poetry.

I have to question how genuine were his loves and how much was just plain inspiration to give himself fame and immortality.

James Buchanan said there was no soul in the verse, only body. Ugly bodies of writhing foaming impure art it was said.

The critics said it was impure art from the well springs of impure life. They were right.

He was labelled an adulterer and a libertine and his self worth was hit.

In the poem 'Lost Day' he tried to sum up his paranoia and the lost souls of his mind, and he overdosed on Laudanum.

William Morris turned a blind eye to the help Jane gave him.

Was he mad, would we call him a smack head today.

He was nursed back to health by Janie Morris and William left the country after they took a joint lease on Kelmscott manor.

It was here that they enjoyed an idyllic summer together and he was recharged.

Jane was not daft, she knew what her image meant to her and she posed as 'Prosperine' for prosperity, the supermodel of her day.

She swanned around in long velvet gowns and conjured up this sense of style that would endure through the art of the many Rossetti'an Femme Fatale.

The 19^th century was a time of repressed sexuality that he was able to key into using muse to paint with titles such as 'Helen of Troy' or any other historic deity he chose that he could fit his stunning beauties into.

By now his art had nothing to do with Raphael, it was Bohemian London in Style a reinvention of the past for a modern age that now looks so old fashioned to us in the 21^st century.

Jane's children strangely called him Uncle Dante and he moved away from Kelmscott and into depression.
He tried to invigorate his art with dancers and brighter callers but a darkness had entered his work, it was where his head was at and he wanted to continue in this vein.

His many patrons, many of whom were based in the Merseyside area where not happy with this lack of cheerful work.

He lived for love and at 53 he died in a quagmire of addiction.

He left behind a legacy of nostalgia and dead end one directional work that went one way down his own street. Some remarkable work.

But he did not provide us with this look into the fields which is where the impressionists took us. He had no desire to get his hands dirty, even for his filthy desecrated poems. But he gives us a glimpse into his own uneasy struggles and desires that were his dream like sequences.

He was too romantic by far he must have studied Byron and myths.

Picasso said he was influenced by Rossetti (and Cezanne!) and the Pre-Raphs.

It was like Gabriel Dante Rossetti was painting his own epitaph for us all to see.

But was it quite warts and all or a carefully selected section of his head played out with style and audacity?

I keep on seeing his work around the museums of Liverpool. There was a major exhibition of his work in 2004, maybe? It seems so long ago now.
 The Death of Beatrice was said by Paul McCartney to be his favourite painting when he exhibited there. (Or when he paid for the privilege by donation). This exhibtion was around the time of Linda's illness.

Most of his high paying patrons were in Merseyside and because Lord Leverhume was an active collector of his work the Lady lever art Gallery, named after his wife, houses many works.

No matter how exotic and sexy his paintings were.

I will never forgive him for exhuming the body of his wife even though most of the critics seem to have done so



.

Bronze Caryatid Pillasters 9ft High-Piece of the Week

These Caryatid are 9 feet High and pretty fantastic and would grace any Belgravia mansion.
The feet are clawed and they may be a depiction of Minerva the goddess but I will have to do a bit more research on that
They are 9 feet high and in the right place would make more than a statement. I think they may be eastern European.

 Not sure how they got to the North West of England.There are not many things that I can buy that would Grace the beautiful Travertine marble arcade of India Buildings but these actually outdo the architecture. The term Caryatid relates to a column or a pillar carrying the support on its head and was used in ancient Greece.

See More Here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caryatid

Antiques Roadshow Valuation Dates and Venues 2015.

Antiques Roadshow will be at the following venues for the rest of the season please see link below for more details. http://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/beonashow/antiques

Why not take that treasured heirloom along or even that old piece that has been laying unloved underneath the stairs for years. 

Whats your story? 

You may not have one but why not let an expert help you understand the item and get it appraised.

Date	Venue
Sunday 21 June	Broughton Castle, near Banbury, Oxfordshire
Thursday 25 June	Bowood House, Calne, Wiltshire
Thursday 9 July	Bolsover Castle, near Chesterfield, Derbyshire
Sunday 19 July	Walmer Castle, Deal, Kent
Thursday 30 July	Balmoral Castle, near Ballater, Aberdeenshire
Thursday 3 September	Trentham Gardens, near Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire
Thursday 10 September	Lyme Park, near Stockport, Cheshire
Sunday 20 September	Hanbury Hall, Droitwich, Worcestershire
Wednesday 28 October	The Royal Hall, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

David Bomberg-Was He A Good Artist Or, Just There?

I am not quite certain why I decided to find out more about the artist David Bomberg maybe I was just a bit intrigued by one of his paintings or his life which was different and eventful,

 Or maybe I am annoyed that he shot his toe off and escaped the war where many died.

Studying at the Slade School of Art Bomberg (1890-1957) along with several other artists of note he was part of the establishment from an early age even though he was from a poor background, he was destined to be noticed.

The end of World War One, and a generation would try to overcome the scarring by trying to build a new world. 

David Bomberg would fight in that war and his splintered life would never be the same.

He unlike some of his fellow Slade pupils, would go largely un-noticed until his death.

 He was born in Birmingham but he was moved to St Marks Street London along with his 11 siblings to a Jewish quarter. 

His father Abraham was a gambler who got annoyed at the slightest thing.

Bomberg was always drawing and he become an apprentice lithographer.

 He paid Walter Sickert for lessons and he sat for John Singer Sargent the society artist.

He then had stepped into another world and Sargent helped him to aim for fame and fortune. The Impressionists of the Continent was dismantling tradition and in 1910 Roger Fry's Impressionist exhibition was followed by another which featured Braque and Picasso.

 Henry Tonks became one of his tutors.

Bomberg was funded by the Jewish Education Aid Society after an initial rejection his education began in 1911, at a new dawn of art. Modernity had arrived.

Tonks who would say “I shall resign if this talk of cubism doesn't cease, its killing me”. 

Tonks was a stickler he had also tutored Paul Nash who he had also criticised. 

Christopher Nevinson and Stanley Spenser would study while Tonk's was teaching.

 In 1912 'Island of Joy' became abstract in form, a move away from his past influence. 'Vision of Ezekiel' of 1912 the year of his mothers death paid homage to his Jewish roots. 

This piece of modernism grabbed hold of the revolution and he went geometric and avant-garde. His work was jarring and aggressive and he disturbed the other students.

 He was ousted at 23 years old. 

 'In the Hold'. You would not know this was a set of workers in the hold of a ship without being told. 

A vibrant kaleidoscope of colours violently reacting with his surroundings its an explosion of chaos. No wonder he was thought a misfit.

War broke out and the likes of Wyndham Lewis would BLAST in a manifesto for the avant garde. It was meant to be a clarion call to the nations Vorticist tendencies. Blomberg would not joint the club he was a maverick of one. These visionaries of desire would strip detail away and throw it all up in the chaos of experimentation. Bomberg's expo in the Chenil Gallery saw him proclaiming his ow manifesto.

 I reject everything in painting that is not pure form” he said.

 He titled one painting 'Ju Jitsu'. One work was hung in the street “The Mud-bath” inspired by Brick lane baths it was framed with bunting, but this was an all singing all dancing Union Jack. The three colours of red white and blur was framed within a beige and unceremoniously split by a central black column. It must have looked bizarre in the time of 1914 just as war was declared between Austrian Hungary and Serbia after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

He enlisted in The Royal Engineers and married Alice and then went to fight at The Somme. He got a lesson in double quick step to carnage. His snatched sketches show him studying the conflict but he also wrote poems, that sum up his thoughts in prose.

War is a leveller to art, art is stripped back to raw emotion. To those who fought and those who didn't, but also those that can convey the emotion of death.

I have not read his war poetry but it is well documented how he talks about fattened maggots feeding on the lost. His monochrome sketches done in the boredom before the bomb, he shot himself in the foot. He was withdrawn from the front. He escaped the death that many had, but he gained the title of a coward who would leave his fellows to fight for him.

'Sappers at Work' was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials fund, that made up for the rejection of his poetry by all the publishers. His breakdown seems to show through the brushstrokes. He uses Caravaggio's Martyrdom of St Peter as a metaphor to the 'Death of Peter by Crucifixion' and uses the memorial to show the strife the sappers had in carrying out their deadly death dig below ground, tunnelling away below they laid their deathly mines and blew all to kingdom come.

In 1923 he went to Jerusalem in Palestine where a tenth of the population were Jewish. He was still traumatised and he painted 'Rooftops' in geometric form. These quiet pictures gave way to depictions of Zionist pioneer camps. And just like those world war crater scars the quarrymen build their new developments in the sunshine. In Bomberg's mind.

He was shocked by the Armenian Genocide and he painted the inside of the church that he was smuggled into.

He paints shapes in quick succession and when the earthquake struck chaos ensued, the painting he was doing in a house was shattered moments after he left.

These pictures were never accepted by the art establishment.

His work is housed in the Borough Road Gallery and it houses Sarah Rose's collection.

In 1928 back in London he met Lillian Holt again and they wed. He went to Spain to follow the footsteps of El Greco. His work becomes fast and huddled in the way he paint landscape in contrast to his Palestine pictures. Does he finally leave his shell shock behind. In Ronda children were born and so was a new style where the past and the present was indistinguishable. He paints a bridge over and over again, maybe a metaphor. He was not to know the deaths that would come from civil war on that bridge, people would be tossed over to their death.

He returned to London. And his self portraits continue.

 His double headed portrait of 1937 seems to echo in Francis Bacon. He has two faces are his own reflective past showing his awkwardness and his unsettled thoughts. He would not paint much longer, and London would be under siege. 'Evening in the City of London' is an energetic and quickly charcoaled study from the top of St Brides across from St Paul Cathedral the symbol of the defiance of the blitz. He would not give in.

Bomberg started a art class after the war where he taught two nights a week. His Borough Group were fed his philosophy for the spirit in the man. Miles Richmond would be part of this group but it fell apart soon after its formation in 1947.

Holocaust survivors would daub their emotions in structured chaos of the inner self. The thoughts of crucifixion of Bomberg as the Messiah. Gustav Metzger who arrived as a Kinder transport refugee would make 'Auto-Destructive Art' a film of 1965 using his declaration of an alternative to painting by spraying acid on to canvas.

In 1965 a set up. These burning acid canvas would give way to images of St Paul's. Metzger recently said about Bomberg who taught him “he was poetic and prophetic if nothing he had charisma”.

Bomberg was sacked from his teaching position in 1953 and went to teach in Spain. It never worked out. He always wanted to paint with an economy of means. While the Vorticists held retrospectives his health faltered. Distance does not exist he said as he closed his eyes. He was taken back to London where he died. The arts council held a survey of his career bringing together 72 works. His last self portrait is a tragedy of doom laden rejection. Holding his brushes he did not look in the mirror.

He told his students that great paintings could change the world.