SÈVRES PORCELAIN VASE.—MODERN.
HENRI DEUX CANDLESTICK.
The visitor to the Ceramic Gallery in this museum will be apt to admit that there were never windows that shed more light than these of the kind required by a student. He will see lustres on the lustre-wares beyond what mere sunlight can give, and the huge dragons, deer, and horned birds on the Moresque-Spanish dishes will link the culture of 1882 with the barbaric mediæval mythology. He will, indeed, find at every step that he is really exploring in this gallery of pots and dishes strata marked all over with the vestiges of human and ethnical development. Nothing can be more complete than the arrangement of the gallery. Not only is it chronological, but beneath each particular specimen a card tells when and where it was made, and the price paid for it by the museum. If it has gone off with the floating collection, the card reports that also. One may learn what changes have occurred in the prices of such wares by finding Sèvres vases, for instance, marked at £100 or £200, of a like character with those six for which Lord Dudley recently paid £17,500. These are articles which, when first collected, incited the first cabinet minister who inspected them to ask, “What’s the use of all this trash?” There is a single candlestick in this room now worth all the “trash” in that noble lord’s mansion. It is a specimen of that famous “Henri Deux ware” of which only fifty-five pieces exist, so far as is known. This elegant ware has been such a puzzle to antiquarians that no fewer than thirteen different works have been written about it. It was finally ascertained by M. Riocreux, of the Imperial Ceramic Museum at Sèvres, that the pottery was made at Oiron, in France; that two artists made it in the earlier part of the sixteenth century for Henry II. and his queen, whose initials or monograms are on several of the pieces; and the artists were François Cherpentier and Jean Bernard. Cherpentier, the chief maker, had been an architect, and when he set about working in earthen-ware he was fond of moulding it in little monumental shapes, and filling in the hollows with different colors. The candlestick has a pale yellow ground, with arabesques, etc., in reddish-brown. The base is circular, with projecting brackets, on which stand three boys holding shields inscribed with the arms and cipher of Henri Deux. Above are three terminal figures of satyrs. This work (which it is to be hoped will some day be called by the artist’s name instead of the king’s) is less than a foot high; it cost £750, and is one of the cheapest purchases ever made. Seven of the fifty-five specimens of this ware are in the collection of Sir Anthony de Rothschild, two in that of Baron Lionel de Rothschild, two in that of Baron Gustave de Rothschild, three in that of Baron Alphonse de Rothschild, while the Louvre has the same number as the South Kensington Museum—five. Three very beautiful specimens (candlestick, ewer, and large salt-cellar) were found some years ago, very carefully wrapped in a blanket, placed in a wicker clothes-basket, under a bed in a garret of Narford Hall. Our engraving (p. 56) represents the candlestick so found. The pieces were no doubt collected by Sir Andrew Fountaine in France, in the last century, and, put away perhaps by some provident house-keeper, now turn up as a more valuable bequest to the old connoisseur’s descendants than he could have imagined, but which is rightly appreciated by the present owner of the pieces, Mr. Andrew Fountaine. The other specimens of this Henri Deux ware in this gallery are two tazzas, a plateau, and a wonderful salt-cellar, of which last the skill of a pupil at South Kensington enables me to give the linear design.
HENRI DEUX SALT-CELLAR.