Charlotte Roelofsen
Head of Netherlands
Lot 102*
An Amsterdam plaque depicting Winter, circa 1730-45
21 November 2023, 13:00 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £5,120 inc. premium
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Madeleine Cater
Associate Specialist
Charlie Thomas
Group Head, Private Collections, Furniture & Works of Art, U.K
An Amsterdam plaque depicting Winter, circa 1730-45
Decorated with an elegant couple ice skating, surrounded by smaller figures, some smoking from long pipes, a small dog or 'Keeshondje' dancing around the couple, an imaginary city cropping up behind the couple, 28cm wide x 2cm deep x 38.5cm high, (11in wide x 0 1/2in deep x 15in high) (some restored sections to the rim)
Footnotes
Provenance
With H.C. van Vliet, Amsterdam;
Sotheby's, Amsterdam, 10 October 1978.
Exhibited
Amsterdam Historisch Museum (now the Amsterdam Museum), Delfts uit de provincie. Aardewerk uit Hollandse tegelfabrieken (Delft From The Province. Pottery From Dutch Tile Factories), 3 September 1999 - 9 January 2000.
Literature
J.D. van Dam, Delfts uit de Provincie, Vormen uit Vuur, vol. 168/169 (1999) , p.53, cat. no. 51.
Another polychrome plaque with the same depiction, also attributed to Amsterdam, is illustrated by Van Dam (op.cit. p. 53, cat.no. 51a), however its whereabouts today are unknown.
In the last 50 years there has been much added to the research into the exact historic locations of the Dutch Delftware factories in the city of Delft, but also outside of this main centre of production. We know that tiles and plaques were made in Rotterdam, and that Utrecht and particularly Amsterdam, too, were locations for smaller but interesting factories. Jan Daniel van Dam published an important account in the newsletter of Dutch Ceramics, called Vormen uit Vuur in 1999 under the title 'Delftware from the Provinces (op.cit.).
Here, Van Dam discusses the necessity for Amsterdam and Rotterdam makers who up until the first quarter of the 18th century mainly produced tiles, to re-invent their trade with the decline of demand for tiled interiors in the Netherlands and beyond. It may be that the present plaque is the result of such an adaptation, feeding a market hungry for less costly but impressive pieces of Delftware for the interior. Van Dam argues that as a result, the rims and borders around these Amsterdam or Rotterdam plaques often show a less refined finishing than those produced in Delft, often the plaques we now identify as Amsterdam have a rim that is later applied rather than moulded from the outset like in Delft.
This plaque is likely composed using several print sources, the most prominent being the print of Winter from a series of the Seasons by Hendrick Goltzius (1558 – 1617), which were in turn copied by Jan Saenredam (1565 – 1607) in 1601.
Image credit: Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-10.616