Last fall we educated a television producer who was thinking of making a new reality television series and wanted to learn more about quirky antiques. We had fun, and in talking about our favorite things, we fell in love with this business all over again. I thought I’d share with you a few items that we discussed.
Antique objects often serve as ambassadors for a period of history. While our knowledge of history is written and oral antiques are a reminder of the concreteness of our past. For example, the stanhope tells a tiny part of the history of photography, cinema and of our collective hunger for fantastical audience experiences.
Our Victorian Stanhope, which we selling for $395
John Benjamin Dancer adapted a medical magnification device and created the stanhope in the mid-19th century. The stanhope suspends a tiny image, the size of a grain of rice, in front of a magnifier. These magnifiers come in many different forms and were sometimes embedded in small objects such as crosses. At first glance, the stanhope looks simply like a magnification glass, or even a small cabochon stone. One must peer through the magnification to see the tiny image hidden within. The pleasure of the stanhope is in the surprise. Images in a stanhope can be anything, although religious icons and naked women were equally popular. Our stanhope features a japanese pagoda. At a time when people were increasingly excited by images (photography had just been invented, and the Lumier brothers would soon invent moving pictures), the stanhope was an magical experience for its audience.
Although distorted, this is an view of the tiny image through the magnifying glass.
People loved the stanope because of the element of surprise and unbelievability of the whole experience, not just of the image. In this way, the ipad and 3D technologies exist on a continuum with the stanhope. Our desires haven’t changed, but our expectations have become more sophisticated.
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Stay tuned, next blog will be about the Derby Grotesque Dwarves.
Grotesque Dwarves
Somewhere between 1612 and 1621 Jacques Callot, an English nobleman, became a master engraver whose work was sought by important people from France, England and Spain, including, notably, Rembrandt. His focus was on was England’s poorest people. He sketched ‘grotesque people’ who made money at the market by selling viewings to their disfigured bodies. His subject was the degradation of human performance. One of his most famous sketches, ‘Grotesque Dwarves,’ is based on a father and son team of dwarves who walked around the market with advertisements on their over sized hats. They charged for these advertisement spaces and thus became the first human billboards before the proliferation of branding.
Jacques Callot's Etching of the Grotesque Dwarves
It is surprising, then, that these sketches inspired Derby porcelain to make beautiful figures. The fineness of the Derby renditions of the Grotesque Dwarves show a true reverence for both subject and artist.
One of our Crown Derby Dwarves, circa 1970. His hat reads, "The Theatre Royal Haymarket. Tomorrow the 'Hunchback' with the 'Rent Day' and 'John Jones' on Tuesday with an original comedy called 'The 18th' . To comclude wtih 'Popping the Question' and other entertainments"