Carlton Hobbs Weblog

The Nostell Priory Cabinets

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:44:56 +0000

Nostell Priory. © The National Trust 2003-05

Nostell Priory is a Palladian house in Nostell, West Yorkshire, built on the site of a medieval priory. The estate was purchased by the Winn family in the 1650’s and that family has lived there ever since construction began on the present building in 1733, to a design based on Palladio’s Villa Mocenigo. The house retains extensive work by the celebrated architects and designers James Paine and Robert Adam, with decorative painting by A. Zucchi and a collection of furniture by Thomas Chippendale.

The Nostell Priory breakfront side cabinets designed by Thomas Ward. Carlton Hobbs LLC.

The home remained largely unaltered through the end of the 18th century until Charles Winn began improvements at the house, which were carried out between 1819-36. In the Carlton Hobbs LLC collection, we have a pair of breakfront cabinets made during this rare period of activity and refurbishing at Nostell Priory. They were almost certainly designed by Thomas Ward of Frith Street and were supplied for the breakfast room, which he redecorated entirely from 1819 to 1821.

One of the cabinets in situ, the Breakfast Room, Nostell Priory, 1915.

These cabinets are constructed of solid Goncalo Alves, a rare and expensive timber, which, in its color and figuring, lies midway between mahogany and rosewood. The making of these cabinets was obviously a long and costly project. The detailed carving runs to over two hundred feet in length; in addition much attention has been paid to the elaborate grills and the quirky ball-and-spire alternating with trefoil design of the gallery.

Detail of the superb carving.

Musical Chairs!

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:40:03 +0000

Highly unusual lyre-back armchair. English, circa 1795. Carlton Hobbs LLC.

The use of the form of the ancient lyre in the square back of a chair was an innovation of the first phase of post-Rococo Neo-Classicism in the second part of the Eighteenth Century. The lyre itself was derived from depictions of the instrument in Greek and Roman vases; these vases were central to the revival of interest in the antique that exercised a profound influence on the development of the decorative arts in the period.

Apollo Cup, circa 480-470 BCE; Delphi Museum, Greece.

The form of these vases and the scenes they depict began to exercise a great hold on the imagination of the age through the propagation of works such as Pierre François d’Hancarville’s four volume Catalogue of the Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman antiquities from the cabinet of the Hon. William Hamilton, published between 1767 and 1776.

Robert Adam made use of the lyre form in chairs of the 1770’s, as did designers such as John Linnell who worked under his influence. Visiting Adam’s Osterley in 1773, Horace Walpole observed: “The chairs are taken from antique lyres and make a charming harmony.” A chair from Osterley, designed by Adam and today in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, is an example of his use of the lyre splat; conceived in a highly stylised mode of scrolling decoration and lapping acanthus leaves. A second chair from the V&A, also designed for Osterley, probably by John Linnell, illustrates the way that the form of the lyre became highly stylised in some of the furniture of the 1770’s.

Matching lyre-back side chair. English, circa 1795. Carlton Hobbs LLC.

In the present set of chairs, however, the lyre takes a highly unusual naturalistic form, with knots in the curving arms and carved undulations in the wood. The striking effect is accentuated by the simplicity of the overall form of the chair; the back itself is filled only by the form of the lyre, in contrast with the more exuberant stylization of the chairs from earlier in the century. They are related to a similar pair of English painted armchairs sold by Christie’s London, 21 April 1994 (below).

One of a pair of Late George III lyre-back armchairs. Sole by Christie's London, 21 April 1994.

Up In The Air! Eight Aviation Watercolors

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:16:34 +0000

This set of eight large watercolors of World War I Airplanes was painted by Riccardo Caviglioli (1895 -1975), an Italian aviator and painter born in Milan. Caviglioli received multiple decorations during World War I, and during his lifetime worked as an aeronautical writer, designer and illustrator for advertising campaigns. Additionally, he wrote a book entitled Austrian-Hungary Aviation on the Italian Front between 1915 and 1918 published in 1930.

Caviglioli’s aviation watercolors were first presented at the Torino Exposition in 1928. His designs represent true historic reconstructions of a glorious past, and through his artistic style he was able to depict the impression of flight, glides, turns and takeoffs.

Caviglioli offered an important contribution to the development of Italian aeronautics, carefully recording the advances of technology during this time of mechanical transformation. His works depict a fundamental knowledge and precise technical description of aircraft during World War I and “contain the duel movement of the airplane and the hand of the painter, who moves the brush…”

Among the German, Italian and Austro-Hungarian aircraft illustrated are the Albatros D III, a biplane fighter aircraft; the Gotha GIV, a heavy bomber; the Aero da Caccia, used for in-flight fighting; the Junkers J7, an all-metal monoplane; and the Macchi M 316, an Italian biplane flying boat (or aquatic plane).

These fantastic watercolors will be exhibited in the Carlton Hobbs booth at the Los Angeles Antiques Show, April 22-25, 2010. If you’re in town, be sure to stop by and check them out first hand!

American Buildings Get a Close-Up Too!

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:00:57 +0000

Last week we took a look at some English country houses that have played starring roles in period films. In this post we’re featuring three well-known historic American buildings that have made appearances on the silver screen.

In 1984, the New York Public Library (Humanities and Social Sciences Library) on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street experienced a brief haunting in the opening scene of Ghostbusters. Standing beside Bryant Park, the Library was designed by Carrère & Hastings in 1911, is one of the country’s finest examples of Beaux Arts architecture. The main reading room, below, is also shown.

The Biltmore House in Ashville, NC was built by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889-1895. Both the exterior and interior of the mansion was used as the home of the Rich Family in the in 1994 film Richie Rich (based on the 1960s comic of the same name).

It is a French Renaissance-style mansion designed by Richard Morris Hunt with grounds designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The house remains the largest private residence in the United States, though no one has lived there since the 1950’s. It opened to the public in 1930 and sees more than half a million visitors per year! (In fact, the photo above was taken by team member Dana during one summer vacation.) The name ‘”Biltmore” derives from the words ‘Bildt’ the region in Holland where the Vanderbilt family originated, and ‘more,’ an old English word meaning “upland rolling hills.”

: Mrs. Rich sits beside the huge marble fireplace in the library of the Biltmore House.

Edith Wharton’s famous novel “The Age of Innocence” came to life in a 1993 film, shot in Paris, New York and Philadelphia.

: Photo by Cortlandt V.D. Hubbard, November 1967. Library of Congress.

The Philadelphia Academy of Music was used for the New York Academy of Music, where Newland Archer first sees Countess Ellen Olenska during a performance of “Faust.” The pair meet at the opera again in a later scene as well, shown below.

Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for famous homes and buildings in the cinema, and don’t forget to share with us any interesting finds!

Blockbuster Reincarnations of the Country House

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:59:08 +0000

What do Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire, Wrotham Park, in Middlesex, and Syon House in London all have in common?

Besides their majestic beauty, individual sections of these estates were compiled to create the fictional Gosford Park in the award winning film of the same name.

The cast of Gosford Park in the Wrotham Park saloon.

The English countryside has always been a popular hunting ground for historically accurate movie locations. Some of the more popular films being Pride and Prejudice (Basildon Park), The Remains of the Day (Dyrham Park), and The Hound of the Baskervilles (Knightshayes Court).

Dyrham Park. © The National Trust 2003-05.

Belton House, featured in a number of BBC period miniseries and Castle Howard, most recently filmed for Brideshead Revisited, are a few other country houses that have benefited from disguising themselves as movie sets. Some mansions have experienced increases in visitor attendance up to 120%! The Historic Houses Association celebrates these giants and encourages film crew invasions (www.hha.org.uk).

Belton House. © The National Trust 2003-05.

A scene from Brideshead Revisited shot in a Castle Howard interior.

Lastly, though not exactly a country house, Alnwick Castle, along with its neighboring buildings in Northumberland, England, has been used since 2001 to play “Hogwarts” the famous “school for witchcraft and wizardry” in the film versions of the beloved Harry Potter series. Its medieval exterior is the perfect backdrop for the films, adding historical and magical qualities of its own. (Incidentally, this pair of mirrors in the Carlton Hobbs collection once hung at Alnwick!)

Harry Potter gets a flying lesson on the grounds of Alnwick Castle.

Large country estates were most popular in the 18th and 19th century. Used as a weekend or seasonal escapes for magistrates, aristocrats and sometimes clergy, the country house was an entire world of it’s own. Some estates employed literally hundreds of people. But while the striking country homes that decorate the landscape are no longer recreational get-aways for England’s Ruling class, they still create entirely new worlds through the magic of movies.

Be sure to check to check for an upcoming blog about American buildings in film and TV–and don’t forget to let us know which famous buildings you recognize from your favorite period movies!

Serving Up a Tile Painting, Rare

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 19:42:14 +0000

The production of painted tiles in Valencia has continued in one form or another since the Middle Ages. The first known Valencian factory devoted solely to tilemaking opened in 1568. Full polychrome designs introduced by Castille artisans had revolutionized the Spanish tilemaking industry and inspired new subject matter and more elaborate compositions. Increased demand led several Valencian craftsmen to open tile factories, which at first were small, cramped workshops with a single kiln and a limited yield. However, by the middle of the eighteenth-century, at the height of the Spanish Rococo period, the city’s tile factories had become the foremost in Spain, and were receiving commissions ranging from kitchen panels in the homes of the wealthy nobility to interior decorations in the Royal Palace in Madrid.

A rare tile picture attributed to Vicente Navarro, c. 1770, Carlton Hobbs LLC.

By the mid-1700s, the most important tile factory in Valencia was that of Vicente Navarro, located on Calle de la Corona. Navarro is named in a mural in the convent of Santo Domingo de Orihuela in the town of Vernos that depicts the history of the tile industry in the 1700s. In one scene, which shows bundles of merchandise marked with their makers’ names, one bundle reads: “Luís Domingo drew it… Vicente Navarro made it”. Luís Domingo was one of the painters of the Academia, and his name being here linked with Navarro’s indicates that Navarro may have had collaborated with some of the most highly respected Baroque artists.

One of the best-preserved examples of Navarro’s style of Rococo kitchen tile paintings can be found in the Casa del Marqués de Benicarló, in Benicarló, Spain. The exterior walls of the house, built in 1776 for the rich merchant Joaquín Miquel, were once covered with Rococo frescoes; and elaborately designed tile paintings were installed throughout the building. The richest tile paintings were saved for the more private areas of the house, and the grand kitchen became home to the most impressive of all (figure 1).

: Fig. 1: Navarro tile paintings in the Casa del Marqués de Benicarló, Spain.

The scenes in the grand kitchen of the Marques of Benicarló are so remarkably similar to the present piece as to allow a confident attribution to the Navarro workshop. One scene located to the right of the kitchen entrance is particularly similar, in which two male servants carry trays of food toward the door. The men are dressed in the height of contemporary fashion, which strictly followed the French couture during the first Regency of Louis XVI (1774-1779). They stand in three-quarter or profile stances, holding trays with expensive food ready to be carried out to the dining room. In each of the paintings, the figures, furniture, and household animals are all confined to a narrow strip less than two meters deep. In order to fit everything into this limited field, certain liberties are taken with regards to perspective.

Another fine example of Rococo kitchen tile paintings, also attributed to Vicente Navarro and dated circa 1775, is currently in the National Tile Museum in Lisbon (figure 2). Here again, two fashionably-dressed figures (this time, one is female) carry platters with delicacies: the man with cups of chocolate that are virtually identical to the ones shown in the Marques’ kitchen; and the woman with bars of nougat, a local Christmas tradition.

: Fig. 2: Rococo kitchen tile paintings attributed to Navarro, c. 1775, National Tile Museum in Lisbon.

Denham Place, Buckinghamshire

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 18:34:34 +0000

This painting of unusually large scale (at just over 14 feet long) depicts the entrance front of the great house of Denham Place, Buckinghamshire and has been attributed to the artist Peter Hartover. The painting, which can be dated on the grounds of stylistic comparison with other of Hartover’s works to around 1675, records the appearance of Denham Place after the addition of a vast façade by Sir William Bowyer (1612-79) in the 1650s and before its rebuilding by Sir Roger Hill from 1688.

: Oil painting depicting the front facade of Denham Place, Buckinghamshire attributed to Peter Hartover. Carlton Hobbs LLC.

The painting has been attributed to the artist Peter Hartover by John Harris in his seminal study The Artist and the Country House. The style and arrangement of the figures in the foreground are comparable to the group of Sir John and Lady Swinburne receiving guests at the gates of Capheaton in Northumberland as depicted in a painting known to be by Hartover and dated 1674. Hartover is known to have been the partner of one Robert Crossby ‘of London’, but a series of views signed by him or identifiably in his style, reveal that he later spent some time working in the north east of England.

: The Artist and the Country House by John Harris, pl. XIV.

Sir William Bowyer’s alterations transformed Denham into the largest of all known ‘artisan mannerist’ houses and, as the painting records, provided a statement of considerable and unusual grandeur. The brick façade was organised around the motif of repeating columns, each with a prominent stone capital, which took the form of a giant order to the wings, whilst the whole was surmounted by a handsome parapet supporting twenty-four busts. These were later transferred to the house and gardens of Sir Roger Hill’s building, which can be seen below in a painting circa 1705, possibly by John Drapientier.

These magnificent pictures represent an examples of the form of the house painting, which was at this date still in the early stages of its development. At around this time families began to commission such paintings either from pride in their possessions, as a depiction of major architectural alterations or as a record of an old family home before its replacement by a newer building.

A photograph taken June 29, 1925 depicts Denham Place as it stood in the 20th century, the house appearing in form much as it did in the Drapientier painting.

Massive Mirrors on the Wall

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:57:33 +0000

The design on which these remarkable mirrors are based was officially registered by the cabinet maker George Sims of 50-152 Aldersgate Street, London, in March 1878 and survives in the National Archives at Kew. Standing at just over 7 feet tall, the mirrors follow the design very closely, although they are given a stricter architectural quality by the decision to leave out the ornamental crest and swag on the drawing.

Although clearly closely inspired by Robert Adam’s work, Sims has lent these pieces an inventive edge by subtly departing from the conventions of Adam’s oeuvre. For instance, the hemispherical fans are curiously but successfully inverted and placed at the base of the mirror. Other motifs within the array of finely detailed neoclassical decoration are on close scrutiny more stylised and angular versions of their eighteenth-century counterparts.

Furthermore, Sims’ handling of the geometry and proportions of the mirror is exemplary and is redolent of the more radical designers of the early years of the nineteenth century, all the more remarkable given the date of conception of the present pieces. The exceptional quality and scale of the mirrors suggests that they were clearly a special commission of the highest order.

The diamond mark [patent registration label] on the present pair of mirrors, pictured to the right, gives the date 25 March, 1878 [top, bottom, and righthand corners of the diamond, respectively]. You can find a detailed explanation of these diamond marks here: The Registered Diamond Mark.

Chinoiserie Italiano

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:19:59 +0000

The Italian fashion for Eastern decoration, manifest in the present pair of mirrors, began with the expansion of trade with China, leading to intensified taste for chinoiserie throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Designers and architects to the courts created interiors that drew heavily on exotic styles based on the ceramics, furniture, and paintings imported from the East, and by the 18th century these items were being produced in a number of European centers.

The Piedmont region in Italy was particularly famed for its elaborate chinoiserie interiors, more than two-dozen of which are preserved in palaces and villas of Turin, its capital city. The “Chinese Room” of one palace in particular, Palazzo Grosso in Riva di Chieri, Turin, features an extraordinary painted ceiling by Antonio and Giovanni Toricelli (Figure 1) that mimics the intricate patterns of Chinese latticework garden fences.

In a departure from the 18th century English and French rocaille predecessors, 19th century Italian chinoiserie designs were more angular and geometric. Similar lozenge and rectangular patterns to those on the Grosso ceiling are simulated in the frame of the present mirror, complementing the simplified pagoda forms at the corners and center of the cornice.

Re-Hache-ing the Semainier

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:23:02 +0000

Jean François Hache represents the fourth generation in a family of famed cabinetmakers from Grenoble, France, who worked throughout the end of the 17th century and the entirety of the 18th century. The dynasty began with Noël Hache (1630-1675), the son of a master baker who chose not to enter the family business, but rather studied veneering in the workshop of a Calais master. This northern region of France was directly influenced by the marquetry of Belgium and The Netherlands. Eventually, Noël set up his own workshop in Toulouse and, upon his death, it was taken over by his son Thomas. Thomas Hache then moved the atêlier to Grenoble. His only son, Pierre, worked with him as did his grandson, Jean-François.

Jean-François Hache (1730-1796) is probably the most famous of the Hache craftsmen. In 1756 he spent some time in Paris where he was very much influenced by the Louis XV style and particularly by the work of Jean-François Oeben. He gradually took the baton at the family workshop and around 1760 began to incorporate more simplified forms and intricate marquetry into his designs.

A strong keynote of Hache’s work is his use of bold and unusual geometric inlaid forms. The distinctive nature of these forms is accentuated by the fact that he placed them within late Louis XV rococo furniture prototypes. The interesting and highly successful tension this created makes Hache’s work unique.

The present semainier was executed by Jean-Francois Hache in 1777 and bears a printed label on which the date, janvier 1777, has been filled in by hand (figure 1). The label names the people of import who commissioned Hache and advertises the workshop’s impressive range of production. According to René Fonvieille, biographer of the Hache dynasty, the labels used by the workshop can be categorized into fourteen types, the present label belonging to type IX.

: Figure 1

A chiffonier by Hache circa 1770-1780, now in the Collection Musée Dauphinois (figure 2), is closely related in form and design. The use of four cabriole legs which terminate in a pastille foot, appears on both this piece and the present semainier and is a signature of Hache’s work. The sides of the chiffonier are also decorated with a simplified geometric inlaid design much like the door and sides of the present semainier.

: Figure 2