73. Silver Figural Art Nouveau Cane
Ca. 1900 A well-proportioned silver crook handle, featuring a female head crowned with flowers at the front. Her long hair flows gracefully along the curving handrest, whose gentle twist echoes the rhythm of her tresses, subtly blending elegance and ornament in harmonious motion. This superb creation is the best Art Nouveau and redefines the line and the female figure. The handle is struck with two obscured silver hallmarks and comes on an ebony shaft and a horn ferrule. The various styles of Art Nouveau ornament were viewed as more than simple surface decoration and carried signi- ficant inner meaning. Oscar Wilde emphasized this in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “All art is at once surface and symbol.” Just as the Symbolists rejected realism in poetry in favor of capturing reality through sound and rhythm, the Art Nouveau craftsman sought a more profound significance through decorative form. For Emile Gallé, this might mean inscribing a quotation from Maeterlinck verbatim on a vase or a table. For others, the approach was more subtle. Influenced by Seurat and Charles Henry’s theories, many late nineteenth-century painters and decorators believed that, through careful selection of color and line, the artist could suggest hidden meanings and evoke emotional responses in the viewer. Sculptors, in particular, often conceived of womanhood as both symbolic and spiritual, embodying beauty, na- ture, and the eternal feminine. It is within this expressive and symbolic framework that the present silver cane handle can be understood. Here, the idealization of feminine beauty becomes the vehicle for the artist’s poetic vision. The woman’s graceful face, with its serene and inspiring gaze, and her hair, fes- tooned with flowers and flowing in a pervasive, curvilin- ear rhythm, capture the very essence of Art Nouveau. She radiates a dreamy sensuality and invites the kind of mystic reverie that the movement so passionately sought to evoke. H. 4 ¾” x 4 ¾”, O.L. 36 ½”
$700-$900
150 - Continental Cane Collection Auction
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