A PAIR OF VERRE ÉGLOMISÉ PICTURES AFTER PAINTINGS BY CLAUDE LORRAIN

one depicting The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the other An Italian Landscape; one with printed paper label to the back reading Fred. Wilh. Wohlfahrt; both set in brass-mounted frames.

Polstjernan Antik, Stockholm

The technique of reverse gilded glass, that is sometimes enhanced with monochrome painting, originated in antiquity and was first revived in the west in Renaissance Italy. The second flourishing of verre églomisé occurred in the late eighteenth century when Jean-Baptiste Glomy, an artist and framer at the courts of Louis XV and XVI, began applying thin layers of gold to the mat of his prints. The name verre églomisé itself derives from this process by Glomy. From the late 1780s the technique became extremely fashionable throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, the Netherlands and Russia. The most well known artist of this medium at the time was probably Jonas Zeuner, an engraver from Kassel who lived in Amsterdam but also spent some time working in England. Using large verre églomisé panels to decorate furniture was a hallmark of Russian furniture production at the end of the 1700s, using it liberally on pieces designed to be used, in defiance of its intrinsic fragility. It is thought that much of the production of these panels was undertaken at the Imperial glass factory in St. Petersburg, see Antoine Chenevière, Russian Furniture The Golden Age 1780-1840, p. 104. The most popular color combinations in Russian verre églomisé were gold on blue, gold on black, or gold on white. Verre églomisé pictures in Russia very most often strictly Neoclassical in taste and often depicted city views. The lot offered here is unusual in that it depicts works of one of the great masters of French Baroque Art. Both paintings reproduced here, Flight into Egypt and An Italian Landscape, are in the collection of the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Catherine the Great purchased Italian Landscape with the assistance of Denis Diderot from the French collector Baron Louis-Antoine Crozat in 1772. Flight into Egypt, formerly in the collection of Empress Josephine at Malmasion, was purchased by Alexander I in 1815.