Vechte and Breadalbane
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Vechte and Breadalbane
John Culme
Antoine Vechte’s celebrity as the nineteenth century’s greatest art metalworker - he called himself simply ‘Vechte le repousseur’1 - was acknowledged long ago. In 1894, some twenty-five years after his death, by which time his few serious rivals2 had also quitted the scene, the English chaser John Harrison recognised that technical ability was only part of his genius. In praising the work of that other gifted artist in metal Léonard Morel Ladeuil (1820-1888), Harrison finally concluded that ‘Morel’s modelling loses in delicacy and life-like vibration… when compared with the exquisite productions of his master, Mons. Vechte [whose] figures breathe as it were in tremulous emotion.’3 Jurors at the Great Exhibition of 1851 had clearly been of the same opinion, stating that ‘no living artist has so fully entered into the spirit of the Italian style of the sixteenth century.’4 In so coupling Vechte’s name with that of Benvenuto Cellini, A.W. Pugin, John Gibson (the American sculptor whose ‘Tinted Venus’ so shocked and thrilled a whole generation of Victorians), the artist Richard Redgrave, the medallist William Wyon and their colleagues could scarcely have been more flattering.
It may seem ironic to the modern reader that Vechte’s success in the United Kingdom far surpassed any which he enjoyed in his own native France. There he was certainly appreciated for his skill and creativity, but without the necessary flow of commissions and their financial rewards. The reason for his slow advancement in French artistic circles was probably due as much to the fact of his impoverished background as in his lack of formal training; he claimed to have been largely self-taught. After years in obscurity Vechte was brought to the attention of the wealthy Duc de Luynes (1802-1867) who in 1836 or thereabouts ordered a repoussé silver vase. Vigorously worked with marine figures in high relief surrounding panels of Neptune and Galatea, the piece was eventually completed in 1843.5 Such was the applause which greeted this noble object that an influential Englishman, prosperous, discriminating but not of the leisured classes, arrived on the scene to change the artist’s life.
* * * *
Antoine Vechte was born on 28 June 1799 in the village of Maison-Dieu, commune of Vic-sous-Thil on the Côte-d’Or in western France.6 His mother died a few days’ later. His father, by trade a craftsman carpenter, was soon reduced to seeking work far from home in Paris, leaving the baby in the care of his parents-in-law. At the age of eight Antoine re-joined his father who by then had remarried but died a short while afterwards. It was not a happy situation; the boy was resented and humiliated by his step-mother and they soon parted company. Vechte, with a young sister to support, began his career as a teenager, finding employment in various Parisian ornamental metalworking factories. At 25 or 26 he joined the bronzist Soyer who laughed in disbelief one day when the young man asked if he might design something for the workshop. Until then Vechte had shown little or no inclination to rouse any dormant talent, but his employer’s unkindness had an extraordinary effect. Thereafter he spent much of his free time in drawing and chasing, perfecting a natural skill which was to take him to international recognition.
In 1829 Vechte married. At about the same time he left Soyer and joined another bronze manufacturer, Vittoz, for whom he made models for pendulums. It seems likely - but accounts differ - that he was actually self-employed by then, for he now began to fashion richly chased iron helmets, shields and other items which were passed off by a Parisian curiosity dealer as genuine masterpieces by Cellini. It was an ignoble but far from unique entry into the world of fine art.7 According to one account Vechte was the innocent party in this deception. However unlikely the story may appear he is supposed to have discovered the fraud only ‘when an amateur [collector] brought him a salver, attributed to the Italian artist, to ask him his opinion of it. “But this salver is mine!” cried Vechte, and quickly proved it. The amateur looked neither shocked nor surprised, but quietly said that if the piece were not Cellini’s it was quite worthy of his hand, [and] begged Vechte to make him a pendent to it, at any price the artist like to name.’8 So this, it seems, was the moment when the Duc de Luynes released the artist from his years of vulgar toil, when the latter could at last with pride call himself ‘Vechte le repousseur.’ He is also said to have come under the influence of the sculptor and designer Jean-Jacques Feuchère (1807-1852) who encouraged him in his use of silver rather than iron.
Vechte was now about 36 years old, with a growing family which in due course would number eight children. He began to receive many orders for special works from the leading Parisian retail goldsmiths of the day, principally Froment-Meurice, Lepage-Moutier, and Carl Wagner.9 Living a sequestered existence at his small house, 22 Rue de Panoyaux, Ménilmontant, he delighted in his work, receiving occasional visits from fellow artists like the designer Jean-Baptiste-Jules Klagman (1810-1867), with whom in 1838 he collaborated together with Jean-Valentin Morel on a sword for the infant Comte de Paris; Feuchère, and Hugues Portat. During the 1840s Vechte was represented by several of his creations at successive Paris Salons for which, in 1848, he won the Gold Medal and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur.
At that Paris Salon of 1848 Vechte showed one of his most famous pieces: ‘The Titan Vase’ - ‘A vase, of Etruscan form, embossed from thin sheets of silver in the highest and lowest possible relief. The subject, which is treated in the style of Michael Angelo, is the destruction of the Titans by Jupiter, who made war upon them for having imprisoned his father Saturn… Below one of the handles is Pan, beneath the other a skeleton. Crocodiles, winged serpents, fiery dragons, and other fabulous monsters of sea and land, wage war with one another.’10 The history of this item is of especial interest in Vechte’s career, for it was commissioned by the above-mentioned Englishman on a visit to Paris in 1844. This was John Hunt (1811-1879), who is said to have been introduced to Vechte by Charles-Stanislas Matifat, the well-known Parisian bronzist.
Hunt’s appreciation of Vechte’s work must have operated on more than one level: first, as a senior partner in Hunt & Roskell, one of London’s leading retail and manufacturing goldsmiths, he saw an opportunity to enhance his firm’s standing by a possible association with the artist; and second, as the son of John Samuel Hunt (1785-1865) who had in earlier days practiced the art of chasing on silver. Indeed, the elder Hunt had been exposed for a number of years to the very best in silversmiths’ work which London could offer. Not only was he a nephew by marriage of Paul Storr (1770-1844), who as the son of a silver chaser may also have been trained in the same skills, but he worked as a silver chaser under Storr’s eye for most of the second decade of the nineteenth century while both were employed at the great Dean Street silver manufactory of the royal goldsmiths Rundell, Bridge & Rundell in London’s Soho.11 Under the circumstances, Hunt & Roskell’s lavish attention to chasing and the finish of their works in silver during the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s is hardly to be wondered at, although ‘such laborious littleness’ was sternly criticized by the same Richard Redgrave who had been so impressed by ‘Vechte le repousseur’ in 1851.12 Clearly, Hunt & Roskell’s chasers, good as they were, lacked the sheer genius manifested in the work of the Frenchman of whom The Art Journal wrote in 1868: ‘Never had more ardour, energy, and simplicity been devoted by one human being to the service of Art.’13
* * * *
By 1 May 1851, when the Great Exhibition opened in Hyde Park, Antoine Vechte had been living in London for nearly two years, forced from Paris in the wake of the Revolution of 1848. The general slump in France during that year had badly affected its capital’s luxury goods trades, and Vechte was not alone in seeking refuge in England. For instance, the goldsmith Jean-Valentin Morel (1794-1860), wrapped up in litigation and about to be flattened by his own financial juggernaut as well as that of the French situation, decamped to London in 1849. Morel’s fine show of silver and enamelled gold-mounted goods at the Great Exhibition won universal acclaim, but even so his business crashed and he returned to France in 1852.14
For Vechte the outcome was quite different. Although near to ruin when he left Paris, where his last commission for a table for the Baron James de Rothschild had gone disastrously wrong, the move to London proved his salvation. In his misfortune but with the success of his ‘Titan Vase’ still fresh Vechte contacted John Hunt and managed to negotiate a favourable contract whereby he would live in London and work exclusively for Hunt & Roskell for an annual salary of FF15,000. For his part, Hunt must have been delighted; Vechte was the greatest living exponent of his art, and the prestige of having him under Hunt & Roskell’s wing was incalculable.
Hunt & Roskell’s magnificent stand at the Great Exhibition easily rivalled that of their greatest competitors R. & S. Garrard & Co, most of whose silver on display had been recalled from clients whose purchases had been made as long ago as the mid 1830s. Even though ‘The Titan Vase’ had been shown by Hunt & Roskell in Paris in 1847, it was new to the English. So, too, was a work of Vechte’s in progress which was could not be shown by the firm in its finished state until the Paris International Exhibition of 1855. This was a shield ‘In silver and iron, damaskened [sic] with gold… [a] chêf d’oeuvre… entirely repoussé or embossed; the subjects are dedicated to Shakespeare, Milton, and Newton.’15
Although Vechte repaid his new employers and their clients with many wonderful objects, he was difficult to harness and worked slowly. Temperamentally he favoured almost hermit-like working conditions, so had as little to do with the firm’s other employees as he could. To make matters worse, he resolutely refused to learn English, always using members of his family as translators. Nevertheless, he taught at least two pupils, one of whom was Morel Ladeuil whose work in chased silver and damascened steel for Elkington’s of Birmingham in the years to come brought honour alike to himself, his former master, and his employers. His own masterpiece, ‘The Milton Shield,’ shown at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867 was purchased by the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) for 2,000 guineas.
Apart from the Shakespeare, Milton and Newton shield already mentioned, Vechte’s chief works in his London period included two repoussé silver vases for Prince Albert, one of which, ornamented with figures of Centaurs and Lapithae, was partly oxidised and damascened, its base enriched with cornelian and lapis lazuli.16 Two other compositions, both of which, like Prince Albert’s vases, were exposed to public scrutiny in London at the 1862 International Exhibition. Both were astonishing in their separate ways, each a tour-de-force full of the energy and skill of his earlier pieces. One was a missal casket in platinum (a notoriously difficult metal to manipulate), repoussé with the Assumption of the Virgin and the arms of the Duc de Berry, an ancestor of the commissioning client, Henri, Duc d'Aumale (1822-1897).17 The other was the enormous Breadalbane Vase-Candelabrum, which was made for the millionaire Scottish peer, the Marquis of Breadalbane.
Undoubtedly the Vase-Candelabrum, standing six feet high, was one of the great sights of the 1862 International Exhibition. The principal retail goldsmiths in London that year were Hunt & Roskell, R. & S. Garrard & Co, Charles Frederick Hancock, Harry Emanuel, Elkington & Co, and London & Ryder. Each vied with the other to dazzle the public, and a contemporary report tells of the goldsmiths’ and jewellers’ stands being surrounded by ‘the unsatiated crowd,’ ‘every foot of the place seems to be alive with legs…’18 Emanuel was conspicuous for his tall, Mercury figure-topped ebonised wood trophy, packed with extraordinary objects like a jewel-encrusted, gold and ivory-mounted stereoscopic viewer. His assistants amused visitors with demonstrations of a novel twittering Swiss singing bird box,19 but while his exhibit was flashy, almost frivolous, bursting with patented coral and gold jewellery and a huge emerald, diamond and pearl pendant fit only for an Amazon, it was Hunt & Roskell which really stole the show with its work in silver vases, candelabra and centrepieces - mostly snowy white from the remarkable effects of artificially induced frosted finishes. And there, at the centre of all, stood the Breadalbane Vase-Candelabrum, towering above its neighbours, a fantasy in repoussé silver and damascened iron forming ‘the repository of a number of the Poniatowski gems, which are rendered translucent by interior lights,’ while hand-wrought figures of Mars and Venus, in keeping with the subjects of the intaglios, rested upon its shoulders. The Athenaeum, a serious London magazine, while wondering if it was wise ‘to give a double office to one object,’ thought the execution of the piece ‘exquisite’ throughout.19
Antoine Vechte’s career thus ended in triumph. For his exhibit at the Paris Exhibition of 1855 he was awarded the medal of honour, and he won a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1867 for his works in the British section, in particular for the Duc d'Aumale’s now-completed platinum missal casket. In 1861 he had returned to live in France where, ‘weary of his long work,’ he died at Avallon in the autumn of 1868. ‘The poor fare of a workman sufficed for him,’ concluded The Art Journal, ‘and he died as he had lived, modest, unpretending, and earnest to the last.’20
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The unfortunate disappearance of Hunt & Roskell’s account books and ledgers renders it impossible to sketch with certainty the origins, progress and costs of their numerous commissions. In the case of the Breadalbane Vase-Candelabrum all that can be said is that it must have taken Vechte many years to complete. Perhaps begun up to ten years before, its silver portions were not hallmarked until the last few days of April 1862 (some months after the artist had left London) in readiness for the opening of the Exhibition on 1 May. Even the presence in its composition of forty-six of the Poniatowski hardstone gems or intaglios cannot be unravelled. This once celebrated collection21 had been formed by Stanislas Auguste (1732-1798), last King of Poland. After his death they passed to his nephew Prince Joseph Anton Poniatowski (1762-1813) who lived latterly in exile in Rome. By 1839 they were in London, offered for sale by auction at Christie’s.22 But whether Lord Breadalbane acquired some of the intaglios then, or whether they were supplied to him by Hunt & Roskell specifically for use in the Vase-Candelabrum is a mystery. All that can be said for certainty is that he became President of the Society of Antiquaries in 1852, was sometime a trustee of the British Museum, and did indeed have a collection of ‘Coins & Metals, Gems, Antique Jewels… and other decorative objects.’23
John Campbell, 2nd Marquis of Breadalbane, was born on 26 October 1796, the only son and heir of John Campbell, 1st Marquis of Breadalbane, who died in 1834. Styled Lord Glenorchy and then the Earl of Ormelie until succeeding to the title, he was educated at Eton, and was M.P. for Okehampton from 1820 to 1826, and for Perthshire from 1832 to 1834. In 1839 he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Argyll, a post he held until his death. He married Eliza, sister of the 10th Earl of Haddington, in 1821.
Lord Breadalbane’s chief residence was Taymouth Castle, Perthshire, Scotland, and his London house was in Park Lane, Mayfair. The former was completed in the early 1840s, the site of it having been that of the recently demolished Balloch Castle, the ancient home of the Campbells, set in a dramatic parkland on one of Scotland’s grandest estates. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were guests of the Marquis there in September 1842, the twenty-two year old Victoria writing in her journal, ‘There were a number of Lord Breadalbane’s Highlanders, all in the Campbell tartan, drawn up in front of the house [as we arrived], with Lord Breadalbane himself in a Highland dress at their head… The firing of the guns, the cheering of the great crowd, the picturesqueness of the dresses, the beauty of the surrounding country with its rich background of wooded hills, altogether formed one of the finest scenes imaginable. It seemed as if a great chieftain in olden feudal times was receiving his sovereign. It was princely and romantic.’
Lord Breadalbane may have intended one of the three-hundred or so rooms at Taymouth Castle as the final destination of Vechte’s Vase-Candelabrum. Unhappily, this was not to be, at least in his lifetime. His will to live seems to have evaporated following Lady Breadalbane’s death after a short illness in London at the age of fifty-eight on 28 August 1861. Her remains were taken north a few days’ later. The rain fell in torrents over Taymouth on the morning of her interment, one observer recording that the grey castle and its environs looked ‘beautiful and solemn… Above was the beautifully wooded hill of Drummond, and to the west a vista through the trees afforded a glimpse of Loch Tay…’24 The Castle interior was, and is, spectacular, a very fitting place for the Vase-Candelabrum. Upon entering the visitor is immediately struck by the staircase hall which soars ninety feet up through four floors, the eye being drawn to an exquisite plasterwork fan-vaulted ceiling by Francis Bernasconi. The main reception rooms, including Pugin’s amazing gothic Banner Hall, are splendidly decorated with wood carvings and painted ceilings. The ceiling in the Chinese drawing-room is perhaps the most remarkable; it took the artist Cornelius Dixon seven years to complete. Stained-glass windows illuminate the dining room and its table large enough to seat fifty guests. In short, Taymouth Castle is as recently described, ‘absurd in its pretensions and its grandeur, magnificent and yet grotesque.’ Like the extraordinary, painstaking work of Antoine Vechte, it is truly a product of its age.
* * * *
Throughout the summer of 1862 the great Vase-Candelabrum was admired at the International Exhibition in South Kensington, and an estimated sixty-five thousand visitors saw it during the Whitsun holiday alone. We can only guess at Lord Breadalbane’s interest in the matter, however; having so recently lost his wife, he heard from Stowe in July news of the death of his sister, the Dowager Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos.25 In August 1862 the Marquis was cruising in his yacht, but by the end of September he was severely indisposed, resting at his Park Lane residence.26 In very uncertain health he left England at the end of October for a better climate in Switzerland. The International Exhibition had just closed on 1 November, Hunt & Roskell and the other goldsmiths dismantling their exhibits, when a week later word reached London that, ‘The Marquis of Breadalbane still continues in a very dangerous state, and no hopes are entertained of his recovery.’27 By then another of his sisters and a nephew, Lady Elizabeth Pringle and the Duke of Buckingham, had rushed to Lausanne where they were able to be with him during his final hours. According to reports he died on the evening of 8 November 1862 having moments before received a telegram of good wishes from Queen Victoria: ‘The enfeebled marquis with difficulty raised himself in his bed, and asking for writing materials, wrote his farewell message to his Sovereign. The closing words of the brief telegram ran as follows:- “Loyal and faithful to his Queen to the last.”’
Notes
1. The Art Journal, London, November 1868, p.245.
2. These included the Italians Antonio Cortelazzo (1819-1903), whose best known work, the colossal Narishkine tea service was recently sold at Sotheby’s, London (6 March 1997, lot 91); and Giuseppe Franzosi whose masterpiece, a chased silver and damascened iron shield commemorating The Flood, was shown at the 1873 Vienna International Exhbition (L’Esposizione Universale di Vienna, 1873, p.247; Sotheby’s, London, 20 July 1970, lot 197).
3. John Harrison, The Decoration of Metals, Chapman & Hall Ltd, London, 1894, pp.56 and 57.
4. Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851. Reports by The Juries, Printed for the Royal Commission by William Clowes & Sons, London, 1852, Class XXX (Sculpture, Models, and Plastic Art), Supplementary Report, p.693.
5. Henri Bouilhet, l’Orfèvrerie Française aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, Paris, 1910, vol.II, p.205; Sotheby’s [Kevin, please supply place and date of sale as per the French photocopy you sent me], lot 138.
6. Details of Vechte’s life are chiefly drawn from Hippolyte Marlot, Notice sur Antoine Wechte, graveur, V. Bordot, Semur-en-Auxois, 1908. This authority gives the year of Vechte’s birth as 1800, whereas most other sources state that he was born in 1799.
7. Antonio Cortelazzo of Vicenza began his working life in a similar manner until his true worth as an artist was recognized by Sir Henry Layard (1817-1894). A steel ewer damascened in gold and silver which Cortelazzo made for Layard in 1865 is to be sold at Sotheby’s, London, in June this year.
8. The Art Journal, London, November 1868, p.245.
9. Wagner was accidentally killed, but his last work, a ‘Silver rose-water dish, partly gilt, designed, modelled, and chiselled’ was shown posthumously by William Forrest of the Strand, London, at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, class 23, 108). The dish may actually have been from the hand of Antoine Vechte.
10. This piece, which has been recently restored, was eventually presented by the firm of Hunt & Roskell to the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, London.
11. John Culme, Nineteenth-Century Silver, Country Life Books, London, 1977, p.113.
12. Gilbert R. Redgrave, Manual of Design compiled from the writings and addresses of Richard Redgrave, London, 1876, new edition 1890.
13. The Art Journal, London, November 1868, p.246.
14. John Culme, The Directory of Gold and Silversmiths, Woodbridge, 1987, vol.I, pp.331 and 332.
15. International Exhibition. 1862. Catalogue of Works of Art in Silver and Jewelry, exhibited by Hunt and Roskell, late Storr and Mortimer…, London, 1862, p.12, no.XXII. The shield is now also in the collection of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, London.
16. International Exhibition. 1862. Catalogue of Works of Art in Silver and Jewelry, exhibited by Hunt and Roskell, late Storr and Mortimer…, London, 1862, pp. 1 and 2, no.I. If a coloured lithograph account of ‘The Last Moments of HRH The Prince Consort’ is to be believed, this vase was in a prominent position near the deathbed of Prince Albert in 1861 (reproduced in John Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians, Studio Vista, London, 1971, pl.25).
17. In 1862 it was shown in an unfinished state (International Exhibition. 1862. Catalogue of Works of Art in Silver and Jewelry, exhibited by Hunt and Roskell, late Storr and Mortimer…, London, 1862, p.33, no.XCIX). This piece is now in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.
18. The Court Circular, London, 31 May 1862 p.512, and 5 July 1862, p.635.
19. The Athenaeum, London, 30 August 1862, pp.277 and 278.
20. The Art Journal, London, November 1868, p.246.
21. The intaglios which formed this collection, some three thousand in all, were once thought to have been fashioned in antiquity. It later emerged, however, that the majority were of modern Roman manufacture, and that an engraver named Odeilli had been employed to forge the names of real or imaginary antique artists upon them. A copy of the collection’s first catalogue, Catalogue des pierres gravées antiques de S. A. le Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, published about 1820, with MS notes, is preserved in the British Library (shelfmark 7813.i.28).
22. Christie & Manson, A Catalogue of the very celebrated collection of Antique Gems of the Prince Poniatowski, etc., London, 1839.
23. It is worth noting that Breadalbane owned intaglios of the same type, which were sold nearly twenty-five years after his death (Christie’s, London, Catalogue of Coins & Medals, Gems, Antique Jewels ... and other decorative objects, from the collection of the late Marquis of Breadalbane... on Thursday, July 15, 1886).
24. The Court Journal, London, 7 September 1861, p.759.
25. The Court Journal, London, 12 July 1862, p.659.
26. The Court Journal, London, 16 August 1862, p.774, 6 September 1862, p.847.
27. Bell’s Life in London, supplement, London, 9 November 1862, p.2d; The Court Jouranl, London, 8 November 1862, p.1069.
28. The Times, London, 5 December 1862, p.11f, quoting the Perthshire Courier.
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