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Two large white-ground lekythoi 2 image 1
Two large white-ground lekythoi 2 image 2
Two large white-ground lekythoi 2 image 3
Two large white-ground lekythoi 2 image 4
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Two large white-ground lekythoi 2 image 8
Private English Collection (Lots 33-34)
Lot 34

Two large white-ground lekythoi
2

Antiquities
4 December 2025, 11:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street

£5,000 - £7,000

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Two large white-ground lekythoi

Circa 450 B.C.
40cm and 39cm high excluding bases (2)

Footnotes

Provenance:
Dr. Ludwig Mond (1839, Germany - 1909, England), thence by descent through the Barons Melchett.

Dr. Ludwig Mond was a chemist, industrialist and art collector, who bequeathed his collection of forty-two paintings to the National Gallery. They were displayed together in the Mond Room at the gallery between 1928-1945, after this the collection was disbursed within the museum.

Both examples have an elaborately voluted stele, one flanked by a youth wearing a pilos, holding a staff and a woman carrying a flat basket, a diminutive stick-like psyche (soul/butterfly) in flight just before her head. The other with a hound standing at the foot of the stele, looking upwards to a standing figure.

For another white-ground lekythos with a youth wearing a pilos and holding a staff, cf. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, inv. 77.052, which is published in A. Fairbanks, Athenian White Lekythoi, vol. I, New York 1907, p. 209. For lekythoi depicting a diminutive soul in flight, cf. The British Museum, acc. no. 1893,0917.1, and Beazley, J.D., Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, 2nd edition, 1963, p.999, no. 177, both attributed to the Achilles Painter.

For a white-ground lekythos with voluted stele, in the Munich Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, no.2779, cf. Nathan T. Arrington, Fallen Vessels and Risen Spirits: Conveying the Presence of the Dead on White-ground Lekythoi, p.3, fig.3.

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