Selected Meissen and Other Ceramics from the Collection of Henry H. Arnhold

Selected Meissen and Other Ceramics from the Collection of Henry H. Arnhold

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 322. A PAIR OF MEISSEN LARGE FIGURES OF MALABAR MUSICIANS CIRCA 1750.

A PAIR OF MEISSEN LARGE FIGURES OF MALABAR MUSICIANS CIRCA 1750

Auction Closed

October 24, 05:26 PM GMT

Estimate

20,000 - 30,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

A PAIR OF MEISSEN LARGE FIGURES OF MALABAR MUSICIANS CIRCA 1750


modeled by Friedrich Elias Meyer, he, playing a mandolin, with a box tied around his waist, she, playing a hurdy-gurdy with a lantern over her shoulder standing beside a potted plant, each wearing a conical straw hat and fur-lined robe, painted in complementing puce, yellow and green, on gilt scroll-edged bases applied with leaves and flowers, crossed swords marks in underglaze-blue.

Height: 13 in.

33 cm

René Fribourg Collection, New York

Sotheby's London, October 15, 1963, lot 478

Angela Gräfin von Wallwitz, Munich, March 2006

von Wallwitz, 2006, ppl. 150-5, cat. no. 27

Cassidy-Geiger, 2008, no. 57, pp. 269-70, illus.

Malabar figures appear in the journal of Marchand Mercier Lazare Duvaux. On April 14, 1749 the tax fermier Augustin Bouret de Villaumont bought from him two gilt-bronze bases "pour deux figure de Saxe debout, représentant des Malabares",  Livre-journal no. 193. Duvaux sold Malabar figures on two further occasions, in 1750 to Madame de Pompadour, and in 1751 to Comte d'Egmont, in both cases on a gilt-bronze foot, Abraham L. den Blaauwen, Meissen Porcelain in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2000, p. 447. A further pair of these models from the Fritz Mannheimer Collection is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and illustrated in den Blaauwen, 2000, pp. 447-48, no. 327. Friedrich Elias Meyer joined the Meissen factory in May 1748 where he worked until moving to Gotzkowsky's factory in Berlin in 1761. The high Chinoiserie costume is particularly close to the print Danseur Chinois from Livre de Chinois, after François Boucher, reproduced in Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, The Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain, 1710-50, New York, 2008, p. 271.