Sebastian Kuhn
Department Director
Lot 126
A Sèvres blue-ground vase and a cover (vase Boizot à tête de bouc), circa 1775
6 July 2021, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £22,750 inc. premium
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Nette Megens
Head of Department, Director
Sophie von der Goltz
Head of Sale
A Sèvres blue-ground vase and a cover (vase Boizot à tête de bouc), circa 1775
Reserved with a gilt-edged panel depicting Chronos with his scythe and an angel seated in a landscape, a depiction of 'History's Victory over Time', the reverse with flowers, surrounded by a gilt beaded border and foliate branches, further beaded bands and foliate scrollwork to the shoulder, the stem of the foot and edge of the neck moulded with pearl bands, the handles in the shape of gilt goat heads, mounted on a square gilt-metal plinth, the replacement cover applied with a gilt pinecone finial, 40cm high (including cover) (cover a replacement, one goat's horn restored) (2)
Footnotes
Provenance:
Sir Walter Rockcliffe Farquhar, 3rd Bart (1810-1900), Polesden Lacey;
Thence by descent to the current owner
Exhibited:
Bethnal Green Museum, from 1929
Sir Walter Rockcliffe Farquhar was a senior partner at Herries, Farquhar & Co., a private bank that pioneered the use of circular notes (the forerunner of traveller's cheques) and became one of the leading financiers of the aristocracy and gentry. After the Napoleonic wars, the bank acquired French bonds and apparently came into contact with Napoleon III. According to family tradition, the deposed Emperor was accommodated by the Farquhar family either at the London family home in Eaton Square or at Polesden Lacey, which had been acquired in 1853. By tradition, Napoleon III was unable to repay a loan by conventional means and so gave Sir Walter valuables from French royal palaces that has been transported to the channel in bullock carts and brought to the U.K.
This vase was exhibited from 1929 at the Bethnal Green Museum, which had been founded in 1872 as a branch museum of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Among many other disparate collections, much of Sir Richard Wallace's collection was displayed at the museum between 1872 and 1875 while Hertford House was being converted to receive it.
The drawing for the model of the present lot, Vase Boizot bouc, is at the Cité de la cèramique, Sèvres, inventory number 2011.3.416. Not many examples of this shape are currently known. A pair of vases Boizot à têtes de boucs with additionally moulded borders were sold at Sotheby's New York, 19 October 2017, lot 232. Another undecorated and unglazed pair with applied vine wreaths is in the collection of the Château de Fontainebleau (F2005-25-1, F2005-25-1).
The subject of History's Victory over Time, here exemplified by the winged Angel as history leaning on the shoulders of time proved a popular iconographical source in the second half of the 18th century. It was reprised perhaps most notably by Anton Raphael Mengs (1727-1779) in the ceiling frescoes for the Camera dei Papiri in the Vatican Library in 1772. The subject of the Triumph of History over Time on this vase shows a departure from the more rococo subjects into fashionable neoclassical subjects on Sèvres porcelain.
