SINCE THE WORK of the Amsterdam ebony worker Herman Doomer (c.1595–1650) was first presented in this Magazine in 1996, little new research has been carried out on him or his colleagues. There have, however, been some further attributions of individual pieces of furniture to Doomer, and others have been recognised that, although perhaps not from his own workshop, were undoubtedly made in his vicinity. It is increasingly clear that Amsterdam played a major role in the early history of ébénisterie in northern Europe, and this is corroborated by a few documents. For example, it has until now been overlooked that when in 1612 the Dutch States-General purchased a wide range of precious goods to be presented to Ahmed I, the Sultan of Turkey, they not only ordered chairs made of ebony and other tropical woods from two ‘Spanish chair makers’ in Amsterdam, but also turned to an ebony worker there. His name was Simon Jacobs and he sold them an ebony comptoir, or cabinet, with gilt locks and ‘rings’, and an ebony jewel-box, lined with red velvet and fitted with a gilt lock and gilt handles. Together they cost the considerable sum of 264 guilders. In addition, for a compass made by Joost de Beer, another craftsman, Andries Jansen, produced an octagonal case of ebony for 54 guilders. This was more than a decade before the Amsterdam St Joseph guild recognised ebony workers as a professional group with its own duties and rights in 1626. Fashionable demand was obviously strong and practitioners of the new craft were firmly established prior to being accorded official status.

THE CELEBRATED COLLECTOR and writer William Beckford (Fig.13) authorised five auction sales of his possessions and works of art at his Fonthill estate in Wiltshire. He contracted the London auctioneer Harry Phillips to conduct four sales (two in 1801 and two in 1807), and James Christie for the famous sale of 1822, which was aborted after Beckford engaged in secret negotiations and sold the entire estate to the gunpowder manufacturer John Farquhar. The proposed Fonthill sale of 1822 and the subsequent sale of 1823 have received considerable attention over the years, greatly contributing to an understanding and appreciation of Beckford’s connoisseurship. The social stir these two events created and the impressive offerings in their sale catalogues have overshadowed the principal Fonthill sale of 1801 which contained some important – and now much sought after – furniture, paintings and other opulent furnishings. The sale also generated its own notoriety over the four days it was held from the 19th to 22nd August. With the public viewing beginning on 10th August, the roads to the estate were clogged with people and carriages and for a radius of fifteen miles it was practically impossible to find overnight accommodation. The Morning Chronicle reported that from ‘Salisbury, Andover, Bath, Weymouth, &c. all the subordinate towns, the villas, and even the hamlets in their respective vicinities, the roads swarmed all the morning with shoals of the young and the gay, slaving as they could to this splendid exhibition’.

THE ORIGINAL DESIGNERS’ drawings, working drawings and copies in the print room of the Victoria and Albert Museum, acquired in the nineteenth century for the education of students of design, were boxed by subject or theme and kept separately from the master drawings, which are mostly arranged by school and alphabetically by artist. In recent years original design drawings have increasingly become a subject of study, particularly when associated with known artists or designers. An exceptionally early unpublished sheet has recently come to light.

THREE EXHIBITIONS ON Islamic art, held in Paris at the end of last year, prompt observations on contrasting frameworks of study. Two focused on the collecting of Islamic art in France and elsewhere in the nineteenth century and more recently. The third, which presented comparable material from a more restricted geographical and temporal setting, sought to convey the meaning of this art for its contemporaries. Two of the exhibitions, Le Chant du monde. L’Art de l’Iran safavide, 1501–1736 at the Musée du Louvre and Purs décors? Arts de l’Islam, regards du XIXe siècle at the Musée des Arts décoratifs, were original shows of considerable importance. Several highlights of the third, Chefs-d’œuvre islamiques de l’Aga Khan Museum, also at the Louvre, were drawn from the outstanding collection of Islamic paintings and other works on paper formed by the present Aga Khan’s late uncle, Prince Sadruddin, and his wife. The remaining pieces, including all the three-dimensional works, came from material brought together very recently for the new Aga Khan Museum in Toronto; it contains several impressive objects, but the coverage is as yet very thin in terms of each functional, stylistic, geographical and temporal category. This is a collection in the process of formation.

THE WORK PRESENTED here is a rare relief in semi-precious stones (in Florence this type of object is better described as a commesso a rilievo, or mosaic relief) on a base of black marble; it shows a young monarch, as indicated by the ermine tippet lined with red material on his right shoulder, wearing a blue velvet coat, for which a beautiful lapis lazuli was used, while its buttons are made of small brilliants (Fig.34). Beneath his coat he wears a breast plate with gilt decoration. The order of the Golden Fleece (rendered realistically in gold) hangs from his neck on a red band; he also wears the blue silk sash of the order of the Saint-Esprit (lapis lazuli of a different quality) and another of red taffeta (made of a beautiful veined jasper) which is the order of San Gennaro created in Naples for the marriage of King Charles to Maria Amalia of Saxony in 1738. An unusual semi-transparent chalcedony serves for his French-style cravat while the young man’s face is made of pink chalcedony from Volterra.

ELIZABETH MONTAGU HAS long been celebrated as salonnière to the Bluestocking Circle. During the 1760s and 1770s, David Garrick, Hannah More, Joshua Reynolds, Frances Burney and Edmund Burke met regularly in Montagu’s rooms to discuss and promote the literary arts. In recent years, attention has been drawn to Montagu’s concurrent role as an important architectural patron, whose engagement of Robert Adam and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart provided highly fashionable settings for Bluestocking conversation.

ON 30TH MAY 1910 the architect Paul Auscher (1866–1932) applied to the Préfecture de la Seine for permission to erect a three-storey building on a piece of land he owned in rue de Talleyrand; the building was to be for his own use, both private and professional. Worth noting is that his building project was similar to the one then being undertaken by Hector Guimard at 122 avenue Mozart. Two years later the architect-surveyor of the Seventh Arrondissement in Paris observed that the work had been completed in compliance with the terms set out in the permit issued on 5th July. Auscher’s career at this time was mainly devoted to commercial architecture and he was shortly to win distinction in the field of cinema construction. After completing his training at the Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts in the design studio of Julien Guadet (1834–1908), he soon afterwards received a number of commissions from two flourishing businesses, Les Nouvelles Galeries and Félix Potin. Department stores were built for the former in Bordeaux (1894) and Le Mans (1899–1905). For Potin, premises were erected in faubourg Saint-Antoine in Paris (1899) and at 140 rue de Rennes; the latter was very famous for its Art Nouveau cupola. Also for Potin he designed a dormitory building in 1910 at 71 rue de Beaubourg, to house employees working at the nearby store in boulevard de Sébastopol.