Jeweled Spider & Spiderweb Vase

Object Details

Hard earthenware with relief decoration, applied colored glass lenses, gilding, and iridescent luster glazes. H 47 cm (18½ in.). Model no. 3729. Dated by its decor, which the literature places in 1904–1905. Assigned title.

Marks & Inscriptions

Impressed on the base: “AMPHORA.” within an oval; the model number 3729 beneath it; and, toward the edge of the base, a single letter D. Scott records the same letter D on the documented example of this decor (Scott 2004, cat. 265), where he reads it as a decorator’s letter.

Provenance

Ger Stallenberg, Het Ware Huis, Lage Mierde (Noord-Brabant), the Netherlands; acquired from him in September 2024.

Literature

This example is unpublished. The decor is documented in Richard L. Scott, with Jan Mergl and Lenka Merglová Pánková, Ceramics from The House of Amphora 1890–1915 (Sidney, Ohio: Richard L. Scott, 2004), ISBN 0-9747377-0-4, p. 165, cat. 265: the same decor on a smaller model (model no. 3259, H 28 cm, Scott collection, cat. no. 0201), dated there Model 1899–1900, Decor 1904–1905, and described as hard earthenware with relief flowers and spider webs, flower centers of applied colored lenses, and greenish frit dust glaze.

Authorship & Production

Riessner, Stellmacher & Kessel, trading under the Amphora name, Turn-Teplitz, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (today Trnovany, a district of Teplice, Czech Republic). The firm was founded in 1892; Eduard Stellmacher, its principal modeler, left it in 1905. The designer and decorator of this vase are unrecorded. Amphora’s modelers and decorators worked largely unattributed within a factory system supplied by the state professional ceramics school at Teplitz, and the oval AMPHORA stamp stood for the whole.

Commentary

This earthenware vase, made at the Amphora works of Riessner, Stellmacher & Kessel in Turn-Teplitz, stands 47 cm high on a tapering ovoid body. Its decoration is organized as a garden seen at close range. Around the shoulder runs a band of eleven pale, four-petaled flowers of poppy form in low relief, shaded celadon, lilac, and blush, each centered on an applied glass lens, a domed cabochon of swirled color with no two alike. Beneath them descends a field of stems and lobed, thistle-like foliage over which three spider webs are strung in raised threads around the body, each attended by its modeled spider hanging on a single strand. The mouth is finished in a drip of green over a gilt canopy of stylized leaf forms.

The dating of the piece follows the factory’s own dual chronology as reconstructed in the standard literature. Scott’s catalog documents this decor on a smaller model with two dates: the form designed 1899–1900, the decor introduced 1904–1905. The scheme, flowers with applied lenses above and webs and foliage below, thus belongs to the firm’s jeweled manner of the mid-1900s, applied here to a large form carrying model number 3729. The present example is dated by its decor.

The surface is what separates this example from the documented one. Scott’s vase carries the decor under a matte greenish frit-dust glaze; the present vase carries it under a full iridescent luster that moves through gold, emerald, rose, and violet as the light shifts, with the gilt ground of the shoulder speckled and pooled. The comparison is instructive precisely because the underlying decor is identical: the iridescence is not a property of the model but a finishing campaign laid over it, which turns a sober relief garden into a surface that behaves like the inside of a shell. Whatever the firm’s ledgers called that finish, the object records a second thought about what the design could be.

The iconography rewards the same close reading the surface does. The flowers present themselves first, large, frontal, and jeweled; the webs disclose themselves second, strung in the spaces the flowers leave; and the spiders come last and smallest, a discovery the eye earns. That order of discovery is the conceit: the vase stages the way a real garden yields its predator only to patience. The applied lenses double the game, since the glass cabochons catch light as dew caught in silk does, and the whole surface, once lustered, shimmers the way a web shimmers. The taste for nature’s hidden architecture, the geometry of webs and the structural life of small things, was general in the years around 1900; Amphora’s contribution was to render it opulent.

The firm itself was an export house of a kind France never produced. Founded in 1892 at Turn-Teplitz in the Bohemian pottery district, staffed from the professional ceramics school at Teplitz, and selling through the international exhibitions and the American market, Riessner, Stellmacher & Kessel built its name on elaborately modeled fantasy wares, maidens, dragons, and jeweled surfaces, produced in series with a finish and ambition that made the factory’s anonymity part of the brand. Individual modelers and decorators went largely unrecorded. The present vase is unattributed in exactly that corporate way, and the record leaves it so.

Comparative Note: French Art Nouveau Ceramics and Bohemian Jugendstil

The French ceramics at the core of this archive come out of studios; Amphora came out of a system. The Bohemian pottery district around Teplitz combined industrial manufactories, a state professional school that trained modelers and decorators by the hundred, and an export orientation aimed at the exhibitions and department stores of Europe and America. Where the French movement’s unit was the named artist-potter, Dalpayrat over his flambé or Carriès in his Puisaye farmhouse, the Bohemian unit was the firm, and the firm’s style was corporate property, executed by hands the marks do not name. The French object asks to be read as testimony; the Amphora object asks to be read as production.

The aesthetics diverge accordingly. French Art Nouveau ceramics pursued the elemental, glaze as geology, form as organism, the animal as unsettling presence, and generally refused ornament that could be called applied. Amphora embraced application as a principle: relief laid over form, gilding over relief, glass lenses over flowers, luster over everything. The result courts theatricality, and here the applied ornament is disciplined into a single idea: the jewels are dew, the luster is silk-light, and every layer serves the spider’s conceit rather than smothering it.

The two traditions also shared more than either advertised: the same Japoniste asymmetries, the same Symbolist taste for the ominous in nature, and, in the luster kilns, the same pursuit of iridescence. Metallic luster was being worked out in the same years on the Riviera, at Clément Massier’s manufactory in Golfe-Juan, and in Hungary at Zsolnay in Pécs, whose eosin glazes gave Austria-Hungary its own iridescent idiom; Amphora’s lustered wares belong to that international technology of shimmer, and this vase is the archive’s Bohemian witness to it.

Set beside the collection’s two French spider vases, the pairing becomes a trio and states the whole comparison in three objects. Lévy-Dhurmer’s vase for Clément Massier gives the motif to line and luster: five spiders in blue, silver, and gold, drawn over webs that cover the vessel. Voisin-Delacroix’s vase for Dalpayrat gives it to the vessel’s own anatomy: a single spider modeled in relief on a folded, ribbed body under flambé glazes. The Bohemian vase gives it to relief, jewels, and luster. One motif, three economies of making, and the Bestiaire holds all three.

Related Works

The documented comparandum is the Scott collection example (Scott 2004, cat. 265): the same decor on model 3259 at 28 cm, under matte frit-dust glazes, evidence that the decor was issued on more than one form and in more than one finish.

Within the Bestiaire, the vase extends the animal holdings to the arachnids, and it is the collection’s third statement of the spider-and-web motif. The two others are French: the Lévy-Dhurmer/Massier vase with spiders and webs (Golfe-Juan, c. 1890–1895; luster-glazed earthenware, H 20 cm, signed “C.M. Golfe Juan A.M.” and “L. Levy”), which shares this vase’s iridescence, and the Voisin-Delacroix/Dalpayrat vase with a spider (Bourg-la-Reine, early 1890s; glazed stoneware, incised “Dalpayrat”), which shares nothing but the animal. The Zsolnay matchholder in the form of a dragon (Pécs, c. 1900; eosin-glazed earthenware, form no. 6625) is the collection’s other Austro-Hungarian object in iridescent glaze. Within the same factory, the Paul Dachsel compote with starfish (c. 1905) is this vase’s named-designer counterpart, and the two Karl Klaus/Wahliss Serapis plates were likewise executed at Turn-Teplitz.

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Related Object Records

Spider & Spiderweb Vase

Open record