A Renaissance Revival gold enamel and gemstone pendant
Designed to resemble a 17th century Spanish pilgrim's pendant suspended from enamelled and pearl hung chains. Formed as a dog standing on a cornucopia filled with fruit. Finely picked out in transluscent and opaque enamels and decorated with six rubies and three table-cut emeralds in foiled settings. Suspending four small pearl droplets. Minor losses to the enamel. With a small, later brooch clasp in place of the bail. Total H 8.5 cm. Weight 24.45 cm.
Reinhold Vasters, Aachen, before 1857.
This pendant is based on a watercolour belonging to a collection of goldsmith's designs that are in the library of the Victoria & Albert Museum (E. 4843-1919). It was found by the German art historian Myriam Krautwurst, and it put her on the trail of Reinhold Vasters, goldsmith and chief restorer at the Aachen Cathedral Treasury. Together with the Parisian goldsmith Alfred André, Vasters made deceptively genuine reproductions of historical goldsmith's work in the second half of the 19th century, which entered famous collections as works from that time. In her dissertation on Vasters, the art historian wrote an entire chapter on this design type "pendant in the form of a dog on a horn of plenty" (A13). She cites as a model for his design a votive pendant from the Llibres de passanties (1603), the pattern book of the goldsmith's guild in Barcelona, and refers to three well-known realizations of his London design, which also shows two alternative variants of the final rosette. Two of the designs mentioned were offered in 1893 at the estate auction of the Frédèric Spitzer Collection in Paris. Our pendant could be one of the two (lot 1845), which has an identical rosette and whose whereabouts Krautwurst lists as unknown.
Literature
Cf. Krautwurst, Reinhold Vasters ein niederrheinischer Goldschmied des 19. Jh. in der Tradition Alter Meister , Sein Zeichnungskonvolut im Victoria und Albert Museum London, Trier 2003, p. 144 f, A13.