Why collect
fragments? Well, there are works of art that
can no longer be found on the market such as Medieval objects. There are others that are too expensive for
our pocketbook, and still others that are made up of too many pieces to collect.
For instance,
you might admire a porcelain service such as the Meissen Swan Service
which was originally made in 1736 for Heinrich Count von Brühl, Director of the
Meissen porcelain factory in Dresden. It
was comprised of over 2,200 pieces. Even though these services were made with many
pieces you cannot find a full service for 12 today. If you could, it would cost such a fortune
you wouldn’t want to actually use it… and forget about the dishwasher!
At about the same time another service was made at Meissen. It was known as the Sulkowski Service and was the first privately commissioned
Meissen service made for one of the Ministers of Augustus III. Each piece included the Sulkowski
armorial. I have had several decedents of
that family living in North America who wanted a souvenir from their heritage. One woman in Canada wanted to buy a plate
for each of her 3 sons so that they could own a piece of their birthright.
From the
concept of owning a piece from a
porcelain service it is not a large leap to collecting parts of an
object. Years ago my firm, Rosenberg
& Stiebel, bought a clock and stand.
This was before my time so I am not sure what happened, but either the
collector of the clock was not interested in or did not have the place for the
stand, or it is possible that it was decided that the stand was not original to
the clock. Thus we found it in our
storage bins. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s we did a
series of exhibitions and one was called “Elements of Style”. It was about the
gilded bronze mounts that were used on French 18th and 19th century furniture. Though not exactly a
mount the clock base was
a prime example of a secondary gilt bronze that conveyed the style of an object.
There is a small
bronze figure made in Nuremburg around 1550 that is coming up for sale at
Christies in May. It is a Venus Marina
that clearly was part of a larger piece, probably a table fountain popular in
the 16th century. You can see
the marks along her side where she separated from the whole and someone placed
the wiry serpent in her hand after she lost her raison d’être as a fountain.
Finally,
something that I own personally and I hasten to add it is not for sale
, a pair of gilt bronze lions. They
were the feet of a clock or small piece of case furniture from the late 17th century. Quite possibly there were 4
lions as feet and one might have been lost when the object was moved, so at
least one had to be removed. A small
piece of bronze was added to cover the hole on the lions backs where they were
attached to the piece. But what
wonderful objects these are, so beautifully cast and chased.
A cabinet in the Bayerrisches Nationalmuseum in Munich has a cabinet with
just such lion feet.
One man’s
trash is another’s treasure they say. The
market is one thing, art is something else.
Sometimes it is not necessary to spend a fortune to live with a beautiful
object that is part of history.
