Fragile treasures in the Wallace Collection

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The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Glass and Limoges Painted Enamels

By Suzanne Higgott et al.

Alfred-Émilien O’Hara, comte de Nieuwerkerke, a sculptor, collector and surintendant du louvre during the second  Empire, was the former owner of many of pieces of glass and Limoges in the Wallace Collection, London. Sir Richard Wallace bought them en bloc in 1871.  Suzanne Higgott covers the history of the manufacture of glass (mainly that  made in Venice) and enamels from Limoges. Higgott, Curator of Glass, Painted Enamels and Earthenware at the Wallace Collection, has done a great deal of work on the collection.

The book proceeds to cover royal patronage and collectors and ultimately to the problems of 19th-century copies and pastiches, which were the result of a resurgence in interest in the mediaeval.  It is illustrated with modern and 19th-century photographs and radiographs.

Together with her collaborators, Higgott has collated a huge amount of information on the ‘vitreous art’ .  The glass is mainly Venetion but the 58 entries also include glass made in Cairo, Bohemia, Spain and elsewhere in Europe. The first entry is for a mid-14th-century mosque lamp – reflecting the French interest in  orientalism,  which was roused by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in 1798, and revived in the 1860s.  

A  jolly Bohemian jug dated 1600 (cat. 51) was bequeathed by George Selwyn in 1788 to his ‘adopted daughter’ Maria Fagnani (part of a large bequest which made her particularly attractive some ten years later  when she became the wife of the future 3^rd Marquis of Hertford).  The last entries include glass from the silver gilt Augsburg toilet service (cat. 55 & 56) and four scent bottles, which Sir Richard Wallace acquired along with an unrelated Sèvres porcelain toilet service (cat. 57). Extensive research is also evident in the 30 entries for the Limoges painted enamels, which are all displayed in Sir Richard Wallace’s former 16th-century gallery at Hertford House.

The book is substantial, with generous, beautiful and useful illustrations of the items – some of which are so small in real life that their intricacies are only revealed here.  One example is catalogue 2: a colourful Venetian calcedonio goblet of 1513, which is notoriously difficult to photograph or view in its usual location.  Here the swirling colours, imitating precious stone (chalcedony) and with a shimmer like light on water, can be fully appreciated.

Each item is extensively described (there is a plenty of technical information here, including condition), history, bibliography and, where relevant, exhibitions.  Extensive notes are also a feature of most of the entries.  Details of the backs of the enamels, frames, radiographs and reproductions of the sources for the designs – often prints, are included.  In particular the prints by Dürer of his ‘small passion’, seen alongside the enamels themselves (cat. 85) are instructive.  Discoveries have been made; to mention only one: a calendar plate for May (cat. 72), which is part of the same set as four plates in the Werhner Collection. 

Two essays describe the technical examinations. One is on ‘Dating eleven Limoges painted enamel from the Wallace Collection using glass chemical analysis’ by Isabelle Biron, a senior scientist from the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France. The other is ‘Conservation of glass and Limoges painted enamels in the Wallace Collection’  by Juanita Navarro, an independent conservator who is familiar with the collection. These are truly for the initiated and /or the scientist!   Other contributors include Susan La Niece from the British Museum’s  Conservation department and Stefan Röhrs now at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

This long-awaited catalogue is the harbinger of a series  that will bring the cataloguing of the perhaps lesser-known, but nevertheless highly important contents of the Wallace Collection up-to-date. As in this case, they will mostly cover the groups most associated with Sir Richard Wallace, who added mediaeval and Renaissance works of art to  collection he inherited from the 4^th Marquis of Hertford in 1870.

As befits such a catalogue, there is proper explanation of the contents, a large bibliography, glossary, index and a concordance, which collates  1930 catalogue  numbers with current museum numbers and the present catalogue. This is a book primarily for the specialist, but any student of the linked subject(s) should be grateful for its thorough research and knowledge imparted.

All in all, this is a scholarly catalogue, which will be indispensable for those involved in the kinds of work it covers.  There is never an end point to such scholarship;  but this will serve for many years as the key work to the collection and its relationship with other collections.  A growing interest in such objects is well served by this catalogue, which brings to our attention a particularly ‘Wallace’ part of the Wallace Collection.

The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Glass and Limoges Painted Enamels by Suzanne Higgott with contributions from Isabelle Biron, Susan La Niece, Juanita Navarro and Stefan Rohrs is published by the Wallace Collection/ Paul Holberton, 2011. 400 pp., 1234 colour plates/ 93 black and white illus, £150. ISBN 978 0 900785 85 6