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NEW RELEASES
by:
Roger Neill, Martin Terry, Andrew Lambrith
Michael Dunn, Nerli: An Italian Painter
in the South Pacific Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2005, pp. 148. Hard cover, NZ$79.90. ISBN 1 86940 335 5
Review by Roger Neill
A new book on the Italian artist, Girolamo Pieri-Nerli, is a very rare event and a cause for celebration. The neglect of his life, work and influence in Australia is shameful, so this new monograph is especially welcome, particularly one with such beautiful colour reproductions of so much of his best work. Michael Dunn, professor in the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, has, he declares, been researching Nerli over a period of 35 years. Anyone now wanting to get to grips with the painter will certainly want to have it. Nerli was not only a pioneering artist, but also led an exciting and adventurous life, nearly always pennilessly. Born in Siena in 1860, he was the fourth son of an aristocratic Italian father and an English mother, daughter of the biographer-cousin of the poet Shelley, Sir Thomas Medwin. After training as an artist at the Accademia in Florence, he left Italy in 1885, damnatio memoriae, abandoned by his family for embarking on an unsuitable career, sailing to the other end of the world, to Melbourne. There he took a studio together with a fellow Italian, Ugo Catani. His work was swiftly noticed: Landscape, genre and figure subjects, all are within the Marchese's range, noted an Australian magazine, Once a Month. What Nerli brought to Australia was an exciting new talent, together with the technical approach of a fully-fledged European Impressionist, though very much from the Italian side of the Alps. He had been strongly influenced in his youth in Tuscany by the radical local artistic movement, the Macchiaioli, plein air painters who were passionate about vibrant colours and expressive brushwork. In Melbourne, Nerli made a strong impact, coming quickly to the attention of the leading young artists there including Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder. He pioneered new subject areas-beachscapes, park scenes and cityscapes (especially in the wet and at night) not to mention his powerful, energetic portraits of Aborigines, all based on photographs. For nearly twenty years, Nerli painted, exhibited and travelled around the South Pacific: first to Sydney, then Dunedin (where he taught the young Frances Hodgkins), Perth, Hobart, Samoa (where he painted his most celebrated work, a portrait of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson), Fiji, Auckland and back to Melbourne. He married Cecilia Barron in Christchurch in 1898, and together they moved to Europe in 1904, to lead a similarly peripatetic life until his death in 1926. Mostly they lived in England and Italy, but they also visited Nice in the south of France for several winters and lived in Paris for a year. So long awaited, one wonders whether Michael Dunn himself is disappointed to have what, in effect, is a lifetimes work compressed into just 51 pages of text, followed by 41 colour plates with short commentaries on each. His section on Nerlis life is very much a paraphrase, and the remainder, focused on the paintings, is equally brief, covering as it does an oeuvre including several hundred works. Those who wish to know more will want to find a copy of the substantial 1988 catalogue 'Nerli: an exhibition of paintings and drawings' of the exhibition at Dunedin Public Art Gallery (copies still available NZ $22.95 plus p&p).
That publication contained a 56-page 'Towards a Nerli Chronology' by Roger Collins, followed by an 84-page 'Towards a Catalogue Raisonne' by Peter Entwisle, together with an essay by Professor Dunn.
Of course, dozens of previously unknown paintings by Nerli have resurfaced in the intervening years, but it remains by far the most comprehensive work. It does seem a pity that Dunn should use so much of his precious space pummelling Betty Currie's 30 year-old unpublished BA thesis on Nerli. Barbara Chapman dealt with the broad thrust of Currie's paper, elegantly and briefly, at the time. The major new aspect in Dunn's book is his discovery of significantly more concerning Nerli's time in Italy, following his return. He has interviewed two great-nephews (the Nerlis themselves had no children), found works there previously unknown to us, and visited the island of Palmeria, near La Spezia, where they spent an average of three to four months every year from 1909 until shortly before his death. However, the majority of each year was spent in London, and here Dunn has made little progress. It is a gaping hole in the fabric of the book, although there are several good leads to follow up. Dunn is strong on the reading of the paintings, as one would expect, but sometimes dates are guessed at, where more specific timeframes can be adduced. For example, Park Scene near Buckingham Palace, London, which is estimated as c. 1915, from the evidence of the image alone must have been painted between 1911 (when Brock's Victoria Memorial was installed in the Mall) and the middle of 1913 (when Blore's east front was altered). Nerli, having returned to London from Italy in 1909, flat broke, asked his friend Arthur Streeton to approach the photographer, Walter Barnett, asking for his help. Streeton wrote to Barnett, referencing another Park Scene picture, and the photographer supplied Nerli with a flat in Knightsbridge as a studio and coached him. It is only after this date that the vast majority of Nerli's Samoan paintings first appeared, although the artist dates them all as though executed in Apia in 1892. Dunn accepts these at face value. They were done from photographs, the two pastels (not one) of Stevenson being based on Barnett's own portraits of the writer, taken in Sydney in 1893. To cap it all, Barnett facilitated the sale of many of the paintings to Lord Guthrie in Edinburgh. Dunn seems to miss the point of Nerlis series of Bacchanalian Orgies. These extraordinary experimental works are not per se invocations of ancient Rome, but paintings of an actual stage production in Melbourne in 1887. As Dunn observes, Nerli loved the stage and its players, and the Orgies vividly capture the action. An Italian dancer, Emelia Pasta, had become very popular in Melbourne in the mid-eighties, so much so that a special ensemble was formed around her. It is likely that Nerli knew her well, and she will be the central figure in the scenes. By the same token, Nerli's more static Aida of 1902 is not a remembrance, but a contemporary observation of the first production of that opera in Melbourne since 1883, lavish and splendid, according to reports, and produced by J C Williamson's company. It is sad that Dunn should elucidate the artists personality from a charming cartoon drawing of Nerli and fellow artist Percy Spence, bathing at the artists' camp in Sydney Harbour in 1892, a work attributed to Nerli, but clearly signed by Spence, a professional cartoonist. Stevenson's first impressions of Nerli, written the day after meeting him in Apia, vividly capture all the essential features: 'We had a visit yesterday from a person by the name of Count Nerli, who is said to be a good painter, also a drunkard and a sweep, and looks it.' Judged by his writing, Dunn seems to be temperamentally at an opposite pole from the artist. Nerli was witty, easygoing, economical with the truth, strongly attracted to alcohol and womenthe classic Bohemian. Dunn's style - cautious, measured, dry - is not an easy fit with all this. Nerli's failure to make a name for himself in Europe was not really so surprising. Out of the legions of young Australian and New Zealand artists who tried their luck in London, only Conder, Bertram Mackennal, Frances Hodgkins and Walter Barnett were to achieve any measure of success. It was a tough world for artists in London, then as now.
Trisha Ziff (ed.) Designer hero. Che Guevara: Revolutionary and icon V&A Publications, London, 2006, pp. 128 100 colour pls, $19.99. ISBN 1851774955
Review by Martin Terry
Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary who was executed in Bolivia in 1967, may not have been as handsome as Gael Garcia Bernal who played him in The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), but he remains an enduring icon of youth and rebellion. This entertaining book engages with Che's face, and raises some contemporary questions about celebrity, branding and copyright. Fifty years ago, while the world was celebrating the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, a small band of guerrillas landed in Cuba in an attempt to overthrow the US-backed Batista government. Despite early reverses, three years later, in scenes memorably recreated in The Godfather: part II, (1974) Batista fled and Fidel Castro became prime minister. Hes still there, since 1976 as President. In March 1960, Che (born 1928) and others attended a funeral for some heroes of the Revolution. Alberto Korda, a former fashion photographer turned Castro chronicler, shot off a roll of film, capturing in a couple of frames an intense and brooding Che. He edited out Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre who were in the foreground. Later, he gave a copy to the wealthy Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli who had it reproduced on posters. An image which had been official and controlledit was on the Cuban banknoteshad escaped, and the book is largely devoted to describing how the Korda image, especially after Che's death, 'mutated, transformed and morphed.' Feltrinelli himself morphed into a terrorist, and blew himself up while planting a bomb. There are probably too many Che faces in the book and, en masse, it tends to have an unintended Big Brother persistence about it. More appealing is the section devoted to the satirical or ironic riffs on the image. For example, 'Cher' Guevara, or Che wearing Gaultier sunglasses, or sporting the Nike 'swoosh' on his beret. One of the strangest is a Streets ice cream, the Cherry Guevara, where 'the revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed & between two layers of chocolate.' None of this has brought much benefit to Mr Korda or his heirs. Korda lived in a more communal, sharing society. He sued only once for inappropriate use, won, and gave the proceeds to a Cuban medical centre. Che wouldnt have minded either. He should have stuck to medicine. Instead he found himself the world's most famous revolutionary, and he wasnt even Cuban. Today, Che's face has become a borderless 'brand', a rarity in an age preoccupied with copyright, piracy, intellectual property and other ingenious ways of asserting 'authorship'. Cuba has been lucky that it has a handsome hero. It's a repressive country and has been able to camouflage its worst excesses behind Che, broken-down Pontiacs, and the Buena Vista Social Club. It's an irony, therefore, that through an accident of leasehold, Cuba at last has something more famous than Che, the American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, its hooded inmates as perfect an image for our times as Korda's photo was for the 60s.
Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick Lynn Chadwick Sculptor Lund Humphries, Aldershot UK, pp. 452, 965 b&w illustrations,
ﾣ75. ISBN 0 85331 942 1
Review by Andrew Lambirth
Lynn Chadwick (1914-2003) was associated with a group of sculptors which included Kenneth Armitage, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, who spearheaded the post-war revival of British sculpture. As the distinguished art historian Dennis Farr writes in his introductory essay to this book, 'Though not a household name in the way Henry Moore became during his lifetime, Chadwick remained one of the most highly respected sculptors of his generation, as he continued to explore new ideas with great vigour and enthusiasm.' Chadwick was introduced to an international audience at the Venice Biennale of 1952, where a sampling of the new British sculpture was on view. In his catalogue essay, Herbert Read coined the phrase 'geometry of fear' to describe the emotional context of the work, a phrase that remained with Chadwick for the rest of his life, and which he viewed with mixed feelings. The expression referred to the general spikiness of the sculpture, which Read identified as belonging to 'the iconography of despair' prevalent in that Cold War period. The label stuck, though much of Chadwick's later sculpture had a more benevolent aspect, even moving towards the humorous. Four years later, Chadwick was chosen to represent Britain at the 1956 Venice Biennale. His solo exhibition consisting of nineteen sculptures and twenty pen and wash drawings was so impressive that it won him the International Prize for Sculpture against stiff opposition (Giacometti was widely tipped to win it.) This really marked the beginning of his international reputation and career, and at this point a number of museums in different parts of
the world, including Australia, made their first Chadwick purchases. Among them was the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, which bought a small work in welded iron, 'Balanced Sculpture III', dating from 1952. It is illustrated in this book, which is a complete illustrated catalogue of Chadwicks sculpture from 1947 to his death. The sculpture has a sharp, somewhat menacing silhouette, toothed and clawed yet also elegant. It could be some monstrous sci-fi hybrid insect with a sting in its tail; it's also, as its title suggests, a series of shapes and forces moving in different directions but managing to co-exist in the harmony of stasis. Chadwick had learnt to weld in the summer of 1950, and liked to work directly with his materials with the minimum of studio assistance. Not for him Henry Moore's practice of enlarging from small maquettes: Chadwick insisted on working on
the scale required of the finished piece. He made relatively few preliminary drawings and no detailed engineer's designs though he had trained as an architect and worked
as a draughtsman. In fact, he didnt attach much importance to his graphic work, and most of his drawings were made after he made the actual sculpture. He worked intuitively, allowing the process of construction or modelling to lead his development of form. He was much drawn to animalistic or human imagery, but went through periods of greater abstraction. Above all he was a skilled evoker of movement and weight (or its absence), achieved through geometry and carefully controlled tension. Although he had received no formal training in sculpture, Chadwick was fortunate in his early mentor, the visionary architect and artist, Rodney Thomas (1902-96). I knew Thomas in old age and can verify that to the very end of his life he was possessed of a restless and fertile imagination, and a remarkable ability to generate enthusiasm in those around him. After World War II, while working on a jointing system for pre-fabricated buildings, Thomas made mobiles and stabiles, and encouraged the young Chadwick 'who was then working for him' to make similar experiments. Undoubtedly, Rodney Thomas awakened Chadwick's inner need to make objects, and he began to construct objects which hung and balanced or moved, using balsa, Perspex, aluminium wire or rods and slate. These were Chadwick's first independent sculptures and they date from the late 1940s. But it is the welded iron rod sculptures, combined with an inventive use of 'Stolit', a kind of artificial stone to fill in the interstices, which distinguish the early work. Quite soon Chadwick started to cast in bronze so that he could readily edition a sculpture, and developed the distinctive triangular forms which became characteristic of his work. In the later 1950s, both the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney bought bronzes. The Perth piece is called 'Boy and Girl IV' and is composed of two vertically elongated pyramidal forms; the Sydney sculpture is slightly more abstract, a big angular two-figure composition, powerful and courtly rather than intimidating. This book charts Chadwicks development through a fascinating series of black and white photographs, either of the sculptures themselves or drawings where photos don't exist or the sculpture was destroyed. This is the third edition (it first appeared in 1992) and has been completely revised and extended since Chadwick's death in April 2003. It does not contain a great deal of text beyond Farr's useful introduction, which reflects Chadwick's own anti-intellectual stance. I think that to attempt to analyse the ability to draw ideas from their subconscious source would almost certainly interfere with that ability,' he said. Also: 'art must be the manifestation of some vital force coming from the dark, caught by imagination and translated by the artist's ability and skill.' Chadwick's cloaked striding figures, the curves of drapery accentuating the angularity of their bodies, have the authority of an archetype: from the dark they come and pause awhile, before to the dark they return.
Christopher Breward, David Gilbert & Jenny Lister (eds) Swinging Sixties V&A Publications, London, 2006, pp. 128. Softcover, ﾣ19.99/ AUD$55. ISBN 185177484X
Review by Martin Terry
The creations of designers John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood are among the most absurd of our era. These designers are however the heirs of Carnaby Street, which transformed English style in the 1960s. It is the achievements of pioneers like Mary Quant, John Stephen, Biba, Osssie Clark and others, many of whom revolved around the celebrated shabby rag-trade strip off Regent Street, which are celebrated in this engaging book. In 1960, Mary, who was in toffier Chelsea, ran up her `Peachey' dress. Sleeveless, sleek and short, it could probably have been worn only in the warmest Wimbledon weather. Australians Neale Fraser and Margaret Court both won that year. With its long zipper ending just above some pleats, rather suggestive of sex, it was a dangerous dress. There would be no looking back. The many colour photographs of garments, often of details, are all of the standard expected of the V&A, and vividly bring the era to life. Complementing these are page layouts from Vogue and Nova, and period photographs by David Bailey and others of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, who wore her own scandalously 'mini' dress at the Melbourne Cup in 1965. The rise of swinging London coincided with the demise of the dismal Conservative government, overshadowed by the Profumo affair. Australian Lewis Morley in 1963 posed a nude Miss Christine Keeler astride an Arne Jacobsen chair. The impact of Carnaby Street had little effect however on the new Labour government of Harold Wilson, whose favourite garment was a shabby overcoat. The fashions took off from the millions generated by the music industry, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones at its zenith. The Beatles attitude to London was ambivalent. Their manager, Brian Epstein, hated the suburban mediocrity of post-war Britain. Posed in a 1964 photograph in the book, their tidy mops came via Germany, but the famous suits which began with Pierre Cardin are now more La Dolce Vita, and seated in front of a giant Stars and Stripes, the image has a bland mid-Atlantic quality about it. There's a great shot of the Stones, also in 1964, surrounding a gorgeous 'dolly bird' (the future Mrs George Harrison), and looking a bit rough and knowing. And while the Beatles were starring in the idiotic Help! (1965), it was Mick Jagger who appeared in the brutal and druggy Performance (1970), the bleak movie regarded as marking the epitaph of the decade. Australians, with their natural dislike of authority and social hierarchies, were tailor-made for swinging London. Perhaps they sailed there on the SS Oriana, with a clean reduced decor out of Scandinavia by Hugh Casson. Overseeing its first class lounge was HRH Princess Alexandra, in a painting by Judy Cassab. A more comprehensive book might have discussed the impact of the Australians, particularly Oz magazine and the graphic art of Martin Sharp. More seriously, Swinging Sixties, were told, grew out of a 'Cultures of Consumption' program, a study of shopping, and none of the authors has much of an interest in the importance of Pop art, movies, or the Royal family. David Hockney'whose 1970 portrait of Celia and Ossie Clark with Percy the cat (Tate Gallery) is a brilliant snapshot in time 'doesn't rate a mention, although Ossie, murdered in 1996, was the subject of a V&A retrospective in 2003. HRH Princess Margaret gets just one reference, as does the singer Lulu. That Margaret was prevented by her sister from marrying a divorced man, yet was free to marry a photographer, speaks legions of the contradictions of the 60s. The Avengers is mentioned, but not James Bond, perhaps because 007's suits were from Savile Row; John Steeds signature suit was, again, Cardin. Oddly, the authors also ignore the V&A's own great icon of style, Sir Roy Strong, who epitomised the dandyism of the era as Director of the National Portrait Gallery 1967-73 before becoming Director of the V&A from 1974-1987. The history of costume is a colourful and popular adjunct to social history. Expensive to exhibit and conserve, it's nonetheless a pity so few Australian museums have an interest in this area. Canberra's fine collection in the National Gallery of Australia has been mothballed for years. This is in great contrast to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, an august institution not known for frivolities, which in 2006 presented in its period English rooms a respected exhibition AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British fashion, featuring the shock-frocks of Galliano and others. This is something Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria could take to heart. In Australia, it alone has an active costume program, always smartly presented, with inexpensive catalogues.
Anne Gray and John Gage, with essays by Mark Evans, Ann Galbally, Conal Shields and MaryAnne Stevens, Constable: Impressions of Land, Sea and Sky National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2006, pp. 364. Hard cover, AUD$69. ISBN 0642541566
Review by Hugh Hudson
A catalogue accompanying the exhibition of the same name and the simultaneous exhibition Australia and Constable at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 3 March - 12 June 2006, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, 5 July - 8 October 2006. The National Gallery of Australia's recent groundbreaking duo of exhibitions, Constable: Impressions of Land, Sea and Sky and Australia and Constable, were accompanied by an impressively researched and beautifully designed catalogue whose value will remain long after the assembled works have been returned to the lenders. At a time when the art of colonial Australia is increasingly exhibited in isolation from its European antecedents (witness the separation of the National Gallery of Victoria collections and the impending relocation of Old Masters from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia), this catalogue succeeds in illuminating the links between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australian landscape art and the British school, chiefly Constable. As the catalogue also shows, Australian and New Zealand artists throughout the twentieth century and up to the present have been fascinated by Constable's alluring and ethereal vision of nature. Five richly illustrated essays on Constable and one on his impact in Australia, written by art historians and curators in Britain and Australia, precede more than a hundred brief catalogue entries for the exhibited works. Anne Gray, Assistant Director, Australian art at the NGA, provides a valuable survey of the artist's oeuvre, noting the particular importance of his plein air oil sketches, not only as preparatory exercises for larger finished works, but as highly evocative works of art in their own right. Poetic sketches of creamy clouds, slate grey rain, and orange sunsets constitute a particularly beguiling focus of the catalogue. Further essays discuss Constable's approach to landscape, his critical reception, and his significant contribution to the Royal Academy. Mark Evans, Senior Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, provides an interesting discussion of Constables legacy to Britain's national collections, of which there is no greater testimony than the now handsomely re-installed Constables in the V&A. Ann Galbally, Emeritus Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, provides an important contribution dealing with Constable's significant influence on the development of the Australian landscape tradition, notably on Heidelberg School artists such as Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, which is in effect the raison d'etre for Australia and Constable. Her fascinating essay presents a wealth of new material gleaned from Australian library and museum archives on the admiration for the eminent British painter in a distant colony, and the attempts to collect his works for public collections here after Federation. A scholarly catalogue such as this is an appropriate context to take stock of recent research and to re-assess attributions, especially for relatively modest works in distant collections frequently overlooked by scholars in the Northern Hemisphere. Keswick, Lake (cat. no. 4) from the NGV is a small painting whose attribution has been debated, but is here cautiously returned to Constable, in keeping with recent scholarship as well as the belief of its previous owner Sir Charles Holmes, the Constable scholar and Director of the National Gallery, London. Anne Gray rightly draws attention to the remarkably varied style and finish of Constable's oil sketches from nature. Thus, using these criteria to distinguish between autograph sketches and those by followers is particularly fraught. Technical investigation of supports may help with such questions of attribution. A further three debated works in the NGV and two in the Art Gallery of South Australia were not included in the exhibition or discussed at length in its catalogue. Three of these, all sketches, share the known provenance of the uncontested The Quarters behind Alresford Hall (NGV, cat. no. 21) and like many of Constable's oil sketches on paper they have been laid down on sturdier supports, in these cases board, canvas, and wood. It appears that Constable attached his paper sketches to auxiliary supports himself, as in Autumnal Sunset (cat. no. 12) where his brushstrokes extend from the paper onto the larger piece of canvas onto which it was glued, so the study of canvas types could help identify his works. Furthermore, the dimensions of these three sketches are each reasonably close to those of uncontested sketches, and Constable prepared his paper supports in batches, cut to certain sizes to fit within the lid of the paint box in which he painted them while working outdoors. The late curator and Assistant Director of the NGV, Ursula Hoff, recorded that the attribution of the sketch in Melbourne (NGV inv. 81/5) has been considered uncertain by only one specialist in the field, not yet categorically rejected, and the attribution of it and the similar works in Adelaide awaits a sustained technical, stylistic and historical investigation. This catalogue makes its valuable contribution by highlighting a significant influence on the style of Australian landscape art, particularly in the nineteenth century, as well as constituting a substantial, generously illustrated monograph on Constable, and the very reasonable price for a hardcover volume should ensure it reaches the wide audience it deserves.
Janjaap Luijt Het Zilver Lexicon voor Nederland
en Belgie Waanders Publishers, Zwolle, Netherlands, 2006, 384 pp, 54 colour plates and innumerable b/w illustrations,$39.95. Hard cover. ISBN 90 400 9116 1
Review by Jolyon Warwick James
A well-illustrated and presented volume, Het Zilver Lexicon could almost be described in the silver world as the Dutch equivalent of a combined Grimwade and Clayton, the two standard reference works for an appreciation of antique silver. The alphabetic content and format is close to Michael Clayton's The Collectors Dictionary of the Silver and Gold of Great Britain and North America. The Lexicon, however, combines this structure with the marks and biographies of Dutch and Belgian silversmiths. This is in the manner of London Goldsmiths 1697-1837 by Arthur Grimwade, but without the same geographical or temporal limitations. A similar format combination is found in the Czech reference Encyklopedie Ceskeho, zlatnictvi, stribrnictvi a klenotnictvi by Dana Stehlikova, which is a useful resource for the otherwise disparate and difficult to obtain information on Prague silversmiths. Dutch and Belgian silver is somewhat better published and more readily available than Czech, but still benefits from a centralisation of such information. There would certainly seem to be a market gap in Dutch silver publishing for a work such as the Lexicon. Interestingly, there appears to be no effective comparable single volume for English silver. This may be on account of the sheer volume of information available and the impracticality of amalgamating it. A comprehensive volume might need to be too large, but if workable in size, it might not be comprehensive. Perhaps Clayton's book benefits from recognising these very limitations. Luijt's Lexicon includes numerous illustrations, many in colour, of items and works from the sixteenth century to modern times. There are drawings and illustrations of methods of construction, tools, designs, forms of decoration and ornament. Engravings and paintings of various aspects of the industry are included. This makes for a visually pleasing and informative work. The appendices are extensive and include numerous line drawings of flatware patterns, a list of museums, and of other references which can be consulted. There is also an extensive dictionary of relevant words and terms translating French to Dutch, German to Dutch and English to Dutch. Even without this, the lexicon would be both useful and workable for the non Dutch speaker, most notably with regard to marks including makers, town, assay and tax and duty punches. But the work is not as useful as it might be. It remains to be asked why the book was not published in English. From a practical point of view, Janjaap Luijt is fluent in English and writes very well in the language. From a commercial angle, the book would reach a vastly larger market.
In the 1950s J W Fredriks wrote the massive four volume standard text Dutch Silver - in English. The doyen of Dutch silver academia, Karel Citroen, took advantage of polyglotism firstly with Amsterdam Silversmiths and their marks, (1975) then later with Dutch Goldsmiths' and Silversmiths' marks and names prior to 1812 (1993). Has Janjaap prepared a surprise for us? |
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