Bats & Pine Needles Vase

Object Details

Glazed earthenware, the bats applied in low relief, the ground incised overall with radiating clusters of pine needles; metallic luster glazes in purple, rose, gold, green, and blue. H 62 cm (24 1/2 in.). Bestiaire obj. 280798. The title is assigned; no period name is recorded.

Marks & Inscriptions

In slip on the lustered base: “Clément Massier / Golfe-Juan / A . M”. Impressed: “CLÉMENT MASSIER / GOLFE-JUAN / (AM)”. A . M and (AM) for Alpes-Maritimes. A later round white paper sticker, typewritten “EP-22”, adheres to the base; its origin is unidentified, presumably an inventory number from a prior collection.

Provenance

Reportedly acquired by Elton John and given to Toni Lynn Russo (Abell Auction, pers. comm. to Todd Arkebauer, July 2026; the account is unverified); Toni Lynn Russo, Los Angeles; her estate sale, Abell Auction, Los Angeles, The Traditional Collection — The Estate of Toni Russo and Important California Estates, 17–18 April 2024, lot 215 (as “Iridescent Glazed Ceramic Bat Vase”).

Exhibited

The Art Institute of Chicago, long-term loan, September 2025 to present (five-year term); displayed as “Vase, about 1900,” medium line “Glazed earthenware with applied and incised decoration,” credit line “Collection of Evelyn and Todd Arkebauer, obj. 280798.” The museum’s label reads: “Two red-eyed bats modeled in low relief fly across a forest of incised pine needles cloaked in iridescent purple, gold, and green glazes. These twilight colors were achieved using metallic oxides during firing, a hallmark of Clément Massier’s lusterware. The bats — associated with night and transformation — reflect both the Symbolist and Japanese design influences on Massier’s studio on the French Riviera. One of Massier’s most ambitious works, this vase marries sculpture and painting into a unified design. Mysterious, elegant, and radiant, it is a quintessential Art Nouveau object — rooted in nature, touched by Symbolism, and elevated through technical brilliance.”

Literature

No publication of this example has been traced; the vase appears to be unpublished. General literature on Massier and the Golfe-Juan workshop:

Paul Arthur, French Art Nouveau Ceramics: An Illustrated Dictionary (Paris: Éditions Norma, 2015), entry on Lévy-Dhurmer, Lucien (Algiers 1865–Le Vésinet 1953), confirming his period as artistic director at Massier from 1887–1895 and noting that ceramics he decorated frequently bear the painted signature “L. LEVY” alongside Massier’s factory marks. ISBN 978-2-9155-4265-3.

Martin Eidelberg, Claire Cass, and Carl Skoggard, Clément Massier: Master of Iridescence (New York: Jason Jacques Gallery Press, 2006), pp. 1–30, illustrating fourteen objects signed by L. Lévy. ISBN 0978837126.

Karine Lacquemant, Massier: L’introduction de la céramique artistique sur la Côte d’Azur (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2000), published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, Musée Magnelli, Musée de la Céramique, Vallauris, 7 May–27 September 2000. ISBN 978-2-7118-4046-5.

Sandra Benadretti Pellard, Émile Decker, Jason Jacques, and Cédric Massier, Les Massier: Côté cour, côté jardin (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009), published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Musée Magnelli, Musée de la Céramique de Vallauris. Jason Jacques, “Massier Made Me Dream / Massier m’a fait rêver,” pp. 28–33. ISBN 978-88-366-1439-4.

Authorship & Production

Clément Massier (1844–1917) was a son of the Vallauris potter Jacques Massier and a younger brother of Delphin Massier (1836–1907); with their cousin Jérôme Massier fils, the two brothers carried the family’s ceramic concerns into the Art Nouveau period. Clément established his own workshop at Golfe-Juan in 1883 and turned from traditional Provençal wares to metallic luster glazes, developed through the later 1880s and 1890s and awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. The painter Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer served as artistic director at Golfe-Juan from 1887 to 1895 (Arthur 2015), the period in which the workshop’s luster palette matured; ceramics he decorated frequently carry the painted signature “L. LEVY” beside the factory marks (Arthur 2015). No such signature appears on the present vase, and its date of c. 1900 falls after his departure: the decoration is therefore given to the Massier workshop under Clément’s direction, with no individual decorator proposed.

The vase is a workshop production of the mature luster period at its most sculptural. The bats are modeled and applied to the thrown body rather than painted, and they carry the heaviest concentrations of luster, while the incised ground receives the atmospheric play of the glaze. Whether the model was unique or repeated is not established; no second example has been traced to date.

Commentary

Two bats cross the vase in low relief. The first spreads across the shoulder, head raised toward the mouth of the vessel; the second descends the mid-body on a diagonal, its wings breaking through the incised registers. The eyes of both are touched in red — the single note of naturalistic color on a surface otherwise given entirely to the metallic play of the glaze. The ground is worked from foot to lip with incised clusters of pine needles, radiating like frost, and the whole is fired in luster that moves from gold and rose at the shoulder through violet to green and blue at the base, so that the vase darkens and cools as the eye descends, like a treeline at dusk read from sky to shadow.
The form is a tall, gently tapering cylinder drawn in to a short neck and small everted lip. Massier’s thrown forms at this scale are deliberately plain: the profile offers the decorator a continuous, nearly uninterrupted column, and the composition uses it as such, wrapping the full circumference so that no single viewpoint contains both animals whole. The vase must be walked around — or turned — for the second bat to emerge from behind the curve, an effect that suits the subject, since bats are creatures glimpsed in passing rather than seen entire.
The subject and the technique are not separable, and that is the vase’s claim on the archive’s central argument. Luster is a twilight medium: its colors do not sit on the surface but appear and vanish as the light moves, so that the vessel itself behaves nocturnally. Massier’s choice of the bat — the one mammal of the night sky — gives that behavior an animal form. The bats do not decorate the vase; they enact what the glaze is doing. As the viewer moves, the reliefs pass from dark silhouette to full iridescence and back, the ceramic counterpart of wings catching the last light.
Two systems of decoration divide the labor of the surface. The pine needles are incised into the clay, fine radiating cuts that catch the luster as thin lines of light and give the ground its frosted, atmospheric texture; the bats are modeled and applied, their bodies standing proud of the wall, their surfaces flooded with the deepest and glossiest concentrations of the metallic glaze. Incision makes the atmosphere; relief makes the animal. The membrane of each wing is worked with fine striations that read as stretched skin, the claws are drawn to points, and the small furred bodies are textured against the smoothness of the wings — modeling attentive enough to survive the glaze poured over it.
At 62 cm the vase stands at monumental scale for Golfe-Juan lusterware, and the size is technically consequential. Luster is developed in the kiln by metallic oxides under a smoke-charged, oxygen-starved atmosphere, a process notoriously sensitive to placement, temperature, and timing; sustaining a consistent iridescent film across a surface of this extent, while the applied reliefs hold their own heavier glaze concentrations through the same firing, marks the workshop’s full command of a variable art. The scale also changes the object’s register: at this height the vase is no longer an ornament among others but a presence in a room, and the bats approach life size.
The pairing of bat and pine points toward Japanese precedent, where the bat is an auspicious emblem and the pine a sign of endurance, and both were staples of the Japoniste repertoire that reached the Riviera workshops through prints and pattern books. Whether Massier intended the symbolic pairing or adopted its forms, the compositional debt is visible: the needles are flattened into pattern rather than depicted in space, the animals are set against them as forms against a printed ground, and the composition accepts the asymmetry and the empty intervals that the Japanese model licensed.
The Symbolist reading of the bat belongs to the same years and the same audience. In the fin-de-siècle imagination the bat carried night, the unconscious, and transformation — the creature of the hour when one world gives way to another — and a vase whose colors themselves refuse to hold still is a natural vehicle for that hour. The red-touched eyes sharpen the effect without tipping it into the macabre. The vase accommodates the Symbolist reading without depending on it: the animals are observed closely enough to stand as natural history, and the twilight is achieved in glaze chemistry before it is asserted as mood.
Within the Golfe-Juan production the vase occupies the sculptural end of the workshop’s range. Most Massier luster is painted or resist-decorated on the smooth wall; here the animal is built onto the vessel, and the luster is made to serve modeled form as well as flat pattern.

Related Works

Within the Bestiaire the vase has its closest relations in the collection’s other Golfe-Juan lusterware. The Clément Massier koi vase (c. 1900, H 110 cm) is made by the same procedure at nearly twice the height: two carp modeled in low relief and sharpened with incision, set against a ground hand-carved into diagonal currents, the whole fired in metallic luster. The carved water does there what the pine needles do here — the ground supplies the medium the animal moves through, and the luster supplies the light. The two vases are the workshop’s paired statements of relief animals on an incised ground, one aerial and one aquatic. The Massier seahorse vase (the “Vase Etrusque” form, H 46 cm) shows the other half of the same vocabulary used alone: eight seahorses incised, not applied, into a field of seaweed, so that animal and ground share one plane and the luster alone distinguishes them — the treatment the bat vase reserves for its pine needles, carried across the whole subject. The Lévy-Dhurmer/Massier cache-pot (Jellyfish & Medusae) stands behind all three as the workshop’s earlier, signed-decorator phase, from the years in which the luster palette was formed.

Two later Riviera pieces carry the luster line forward from Massier’s workshop. Jean-Baptiste Gaziëllo, trained in the Massier works and in his own atelier at Vallauris from 1910, took the relation of creature to vessel a step further in his Tentacles Vase (c. 1910, H 55 cm): there the octopus is not applied to the pot but is the pot, the vessel itself twisted into the limbs. The BACS marine vase (Cannes-Eden / Golfe-Juan, c. 1912–14, H 52 cm), from the workshop Georges Massa established at Eden-Roc, returns the luster to pictorial use, the fish frieze at its shoulder carried in the glaze rather than modeled on the wall. Read together — Massier’s applied and incised animals, Gaziëllo’s animal as form, BACS’s animal in the glaze — the Riviera pieces give three answers to the same question of how an iridescent surface and an animal subject are to share a vessel.

The collection’s other bat is the Keller et Guérin Chauve-Souris Cachepot (Lunéville, 1895, H 19 cm): three bats applied in relief, in flight with wings spread, on an iridescent ground of glazed stoneware. It precedes the Massier by about five years, comes from Lorraine rather than the Riviera, and is stoneware rather than earthenware, yet it states the same pairing — applied bats on an iridescent ground — in the small format of a cachepot. The two objects place one subject and one treatment at opposite ends of the country and at opposite scales.

Beyond the Riviera, the collection’s Amphora Spiderweb Vase (Riessner, Stellmacher & Kessel, Turn-Teplitz, c. 1904–05, H 47 cm, model 3729) reaches iridescence by a separate route: a rainbow luster unusual in the Bohemian firm’s production, laid over deep relief rather than over incision. Its molded spiders cling to webs spun between the leaves beneath a crown of grès-bijou flowers — a second creature of the dark given a surface that changes with the light. Where Massier makes the luster the bat’s own element, Amphora sets the spider in a jeweled garden; the two vases state the same pairing of nocturnal subject and shifting glaze in the French and the Austrian idiom.

Gallé wall pocket (obj. 280797) — the collection’s companion loan at the Art Institute of Chicago.