Frog & Lizard Pumpkin Vessel

Object Details

Marks & Inscriptions

Signed “Jeanneney” and “Prud’homme” on the base, above unglazed firing or support circles on the underside.

The names appear to have been scratched or written through the glaze surface, rather than deeply incised into the ceramic body. Their placement on opposite sides of the vessel emphasizes the collaborative authorship of the work.

Provenance

Anger Antiquités, Marché Serpette, Saint-Ouen

Literature

Marc Ducret and Patricia Monjaret, L’École de Carriès: L’art céramique à Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye, 1888–1940 (Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 1997), pp. 115–126.

Authorship & Production

Prud’homme (sculptor, French, active early 20th century) for Paul Jeanneney, born Lœwenguth (ceramist, French, 1861–1920) at atelier Jeanneney (Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye, Nièvre, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, France). The name appears as “Prud’homme” in the sculptor’s own hand on the present vessel, and the signed inscription is treated as authoritative here.

Commentary

This monumental stoneware vessel was created in the first few years of the twentieth century through the collaboration of Paul Jeanneney and the sculptor Prud’homme. Measuring 40 cm in diameter, it takes the form of a large pumpkin or gourd, with a crouching frog and a dramatically scaled lizard emerging in high relief from the rounded body. The scale, modeling, and physicality of the animals move the work well beyond conventional ceramic ornament.

The vessel’s form is broad, low, and pumpkin-like, with a deep central opening surrounded by a thick organic rim. The lobed body and rounded swelling give the animals a believable terrain. The lizard stretches around the rim, its body curving with the contour of the gourd-like form, while the frog emerges from the opposite side with a still, alert presence. Both creatures inhabit the vessel rather than merely decorate it.

Prud’homme’s sculptural contribution is central to the object’s force. The lizard’s elongated body, raised head, textured back, and gripping limbs convey both anatomical precision and predatory tension. The frog is modeled with equal sensitivity: its compact body, folded legs, and watchful posture suggest a creature poised between stillness and sudden movement. Together, the two animals create a quiet but charged encounter across the ceramic body.

Jeanneney’s glaze deepens the naturalism of the modeling. Warm ochres, browns, and smoky gray tones create an earthy, mineral surface, while darker pooling in the interior gives the vessel a sense of depth and age. The glaze does not simply color the sculpture; it makes the animals appear to emerge from clay, stone, and damp ground. The result is an object in which matter and life seem almost interchangeable.

Paul Jeanneney, born Lœwenguth and later working under his mother’s family name, brought an engineer’s technical discipline and a collector’s eye to the high-fired stoneware tradition of Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye. He was known for his mastery of high-fired stoneware and his interest in Asian glaze traditions, especially ash and tenmoku effects associated with Song Dynasty ceramics. In this work, that technical knowledge is placed in the service of biological presence — the surface has the irregularity and density of earth, allowing the animals to feel native to the vessel’s material rather than added to it.

The dual signatures are unusually important. “Jeanneney” and “Prud’homme” appear separately on the underside, giving visible credit to both the ceramist and the sculptor. This is notable for the period, when sculptural collaborators were often unnamed. A small jointly signed vase auctioned at Tajan, Paris, in November 2019 (lot 25) carries an inscription that illuminates the relationship with rare directness: modelé par le petit père Prud’homme, émaillé par le gros père Jeanneney — “modeled by little father Prud’homme, glazed by big father Jeanneney.” The affectionate tone suggests an established and close working partnership, and the sculptor’s name is given precedence even in this playful formulation.

The iconography of frog and lizard carries strong Symbolist and Art Nouveau resonance. Both creatures belong to liminal environments: pond edges, damp ground, stones, and cultivated organic forms. The pumpkin body adds another layer to this natural world, making the vessel itself feel vegetal and geological. Their presence suggests transformation, instinct, regeneration, and the hidden life of the natural world. The object becomes more than a vessel; it is a small psychological landscape, a scene of stillness, vigilance, and latent motion.

The frog and lizard do not inhabit the vessel incidentally. Together with the pumpkin body, they transform a functional object into a sculptural event in which creature, plant, and ceramic form are indistinguishable from one another.

Related Works

The closest comparanda for Prud’homme’s sculptural hand are two monumental stoneware sculptures commissioned by the ceramist Eugène Lion (1867–1945) and executed by Jeanneney, both dated 1900 and both signed by Jeanneney alone: a Gargoyle Holding a Lizard and Toad (H 135 cm) and a Phoenix with Toads and Fantastic Bestiary (H 130 cm). Both were displayed at the entrance to Lion’s pottery and sold from Jeanneney’s estate at auction in 1921. They appeared together at Thierry de Maigret on June 4, 2025, where they achieved results far exceeding their estimates.

On stylistic grounds, the lizard on the gargoyle sculpture repays close comparison with the lizard on the present vessel. The raised circular scales, articulated toes, and alert head position are closely consistent across both works. The present author proposes, on the basis of this stylistic evidence, that Prud’homme was engaged by Jeanneney to model the animals on the Lion commission sculptures, working anonymously on what may have been his first major collaboration with the atelier. The affectionate Tajan inscription and the dual signatures on the present vessel suggest that by the early 1900s the partnership had matured into one of acknowledged and named equality. This hypothesis cannot be confirmed from documentary evidence currently available, but the sculptural correspondence between the works is sufficiently close to warrant the comparison.

The broader Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye context is important. Marc Ducret and Patricia Monjaret’s chapter on Paul Jeanneney in L’École de Carriès situates him within the ceramic circle that developed around Jean Carriès and the region’s high-fired stoneware experimentation. The Lion commission connects that network directly to the present work: Lion was himself a student of Carriès, and the commission for monumental gateway sculptures reflects the ambition of the Saint-Amand circle to push stoneware into architectural and sculptural registers far beyond the decorative vessel.

The Bestiaire’s Hoentschel frog-and-snake vase (glazed stoneware, H 16.5 cm) offers a close thematic parallel within the collection: a reptile and an amphibian appear together in a single ceramic composition, here locked in a predatory encounter at the vessel’s rim. Where Prud’homme and Jeanneney give each creature its own terrain and allow them a charged but static coexistence across the gourd-like body, Hoentschel compresses the relationship into a single confrontational moment. The pairing is different — snake and frog rather than lizard and frog — but the underlying subject is the same: the ceramic vessel as habitat for the encounter between reptile and amphibian, stillness and threat.

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Frog King Figural Centerpiece

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Frogs on Handled Vase

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