The Collection of Todd & Evelyn Arkebauer
A scholarly archive for animal-centered Art Nouveau ceramics, with object records, maker files, geographic context, and image-led navigation through rare faunal and fantastical forms.
Bestiaire is a photographic index of Art Nouveau ceramics where the animal classification is the map. Browse by creature, maker, treatment, and place, then move into the details: the influence of Japonisme and Symbolism, marks, provenance, and comparable works.
Browse the archive by animal group and subcategory.
Animal-centric works with multiple photos and detailed object records.
This Four-Frog Handled Vase by Horace Bieuville transforms a functional vessel into a sculptural tableau of amphibian vitality. Modeled at the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres in 1897, the form presents four vigorously modeled frogs perched at equal intervals…
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This vase by Jean Baptiste Gaziëllo transforms the vessel itself into a twisting marine organism. Made in Vallauris c. 1910, it does not apply an octopus as decoration; Gaziëllo makes the vase behave like one: coiled, muscular, tactile,…
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This 29 cm stoneware plate by Auguste Delaherche presents the peacock through one of its most potent visual fragments: the feather. Rather than depicting the bird itself, Delaherche isolates the iridescent eye-feather and allows it to unfurl across…
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This large sculptural wall platter by Alfred Renoleau presents marine life in high relief with considerable naturalistic precision, belonging to a current in French Art Nouveau ceramics rooted in the neo-Palissy tradition. Modeled in high relief, two crabs…
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This glazed stoneware sculpture by Jean-Désiré Ringel d'Illzach, executed in 1905 by Elchinger et Fils in Soufflenheim, stands 65 cm tall and combines the physiognomy of an amphibian, the posture of a crouching humanoid, and the psychological charge…
View recordExplore the individuals, ateliers, and manufactories behind the ceramic works in the Bestiaire.
Artists
Featured Sculptor
Jean-Désiré Ringel d’Illzach
Alphonse Bertillon's 1903 photographic portrait of Jean-Désiré Ringel d'Illzach belongs to the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg.
Sculptor, medalist, and ceramic modeler whose Alsatian identity and Japoniste bestiary place him among the most distinctive creators of Art Nouveau animal sculpture.
Makers
Featured Pottery
Clément Massier’s La Poterie du Golfe-Juan
La Poterie du Golfe-Juan: the Clément Massier showroom and gardens, Golfe-Juan, undated postcard, early twentieth century. The printed legend reads “Clément Massier est au Golfe-Juan pas ailleurs” — Clément Massier is at Golfe-Juan, nowhere else.
The Riviera manufactory where metallic luster was reborn: from 1883 Clément Massier ran Golfe-Juan as artist, chemist and impresario at once, and with Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer made iridescence itself the medium through which birds, sea creatures, insects, and bats move as though lit from inside the glaze.
Explore the geographic centers of Art Nouveau ceramic production, from France’s regional ateliers and manufactories to related makers across Continental Europe.
Browse the collection by ceramic form and function.
The archive brings object records, images, makers, places, and animal classifications into a single structure for sustained study.