Mounted Peacocks Vase

Object Details

Earthenware (faïence) with Labrador eosin glaze; cast and gilt pewter mount set with four blue glass cabochons; H 26 cm; D 12 cm at the foot, 7 cm at the lip. Mount: Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany; ceramic body: Pécs, Hungary

Marks & Inscriptions

Struck into the underside of the pewter foot, within a six-sided reserve: “Orion” in cursive script above the model number 272 — the firm’s standard mark, a cast-in cursive name over a model number in a tapered cartouche, adopted from the practice of Walter Scherf’s Osiris works in the same city. Two small holes in the foot plate do not reach the ceramic and recur on other examples of the model; they belong to the casting or finishing of the mount. The ceramic base is enclosed by the foot, so the Zsolnay marks on the vessel itself cannot be read; on the sibling model 273 the Orion number is stamped into the faience base beside Zsolnay’s painted numbers, and the same is likely here.

Provenance

Auxerre Enchères Lefranc, Auxerre, sale of 6 February 2022, lot 31.

Literature

This example is unpublished. On the model, the firm, and the German context:

Eidelberg, Martin, David Conradsen, and Johnathan Clancy. European Ceramics Circa 1900: The Eidelberg Collection at the Saint Louis Art Museum. London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2026. Pp. 85–88 (Germany), on the design-school and museum reforms behind Jugendstil, the 1885 Nuremberg Metalwork Exhibition, Van de Velde’s arrival in 1899, and the turn toward a geometric aesthetic by 1904.

KreisMuseum Zons, Dormagen. Vase mit zwei Pfauen, Orion 272, inv. Zi 8/18 (collection Zinn des Jugendstils): gilt pewter with multicolored glass stones on Zsolnay lustered faience, c. 27 × 13.5 cm, 1904–1905. Online record, rheinland.museum-digital.de, object 10480.

Pese, Claus. Jugendstil aus Nürnberg: Kunst, Handwerk, Industriekultur. Stuttgart: Arnoldsche, 2007. Pp. 192–94 (the Georg Friedrich Schmitt chapter: founding of the firm in April 1903, the ORION trademark, the designers Adler and Oeckler, the Zsolnay and Lötz suppliers, the transfer to Orivit AG at the start of 1906, and the model-number dating scheme); p. 206, Werk 157 (the model: cast and silvered pewter with multicolored glass stones, designer not yet identified, 1904/1905, model 272, H 26 × D 13.5 cm, private collection; taken into Orivit production as Orivit no. 2534 per the 1910 Orivit pattern book; the body Zsolnay form 7023 in the firm’s eleventh form book of 1902–04). The Werk 157 example is illustrated full-page at p. 193 and on the cover.

Authorship & Production

Mount: Orion, Nuremberg — in full the Kunstgewerbliche Metallwarenfabrik “Orion” (Orion Art-Metalware Factory) — the pewter works founded in April 1903 by the merchant Georg Friedrich Schmitt (Speyer 1859 – Nuremberg 1938) and operated under his name until it passed to Orivit AG of Cologne at the beginning of 1906. The firm cast, chased, gilt, and assembled the mount and struck it with its name and model number. The designer of model 272 is not identified in the literature: Pese records only Friedrich Adler and Valentin Oeckler as Orion’s known designers, and the vase’s neighbor in the series, the snail vase model 273 on the companion Zsolnay form 7022, is Oeckler’s. That adjacency is a lead and not an attribution, and the record makes none. Ceramic body: the Zsolnay manufactory, Pécs, Hungary — form 7023 in the firm’s eleventh form book, compiled 1902–1904 — in the Labrador variety of the eosin glaze developed in the 1890s under Vilmos Zsolnay (1828–1900) with the chemist Vince Wartha, and produced after Vilmos’s death under his son Miklós. The glaze is therefore credited to the manufactory rather than to Vilmos personally. Two factories made this object, in a division of labor the record keeps visible: the vessel was thrown, glazed, and fired at Pécs, and became a vase with peacocks at Nuremberg.

Commentary

The vessel beneath the mount is a Zsolnay vase of plain profile: a flat round foot, a tall body that widens in a single curve to a straight shoulder, and a short cylindrical neck with a flared mouth — the factory’s form 7023. Its glaze is the firm’s Labrador eosin, a metallic luster that reads as a mottled field of emerald and olive green shot through with gold, opalescent blue, and plum, the colors pooling and clouding across the wall rather than following any drawn design. The vessel carries no decoration of its own. Everything that makes it an animal object was added in Nuremberg.

That addition is a mount in cast pewter, gilt, that engages the vase at three points. At the neck a ring of berried stems, modeled in the round, girdles the cylinder just below the lip. At the shoulder two peacocks sit as fully modeled figures — one perched across the shoulder with its head turned outward and its feet gripping the glazed surface, the second set behind and partly hidden by the first — and from each bird a long tail falls in high relief down the body of the vase, the feathers chased into the metal, the two trains narrowing as they descend and running without interruption into the foot. The foot is itself the end of the tail: a flat gilt disc, 12 cm across, engraved with the spreading barbs of the plumage and set with four oval cabochons of deep blue glass as the ocelli of the feathers. The foot encloses the base of the vessel entirely.

The design makes the birds structural. Their tails are not ornament laid on the vase but the members that hold it, running from the shoulder to the ground like buttresses and fixing the ceramic to its foot; the vase is braced by its peacocks. At the same time the glaze is made to do the work of plumage. Eosin is a shifting, oil-on-water iridescence of exactly the kind the peacock’s own feathers produce, and the mount leaves the largest expanse of it uncovered between the two trains, so that the bird’s metal tail frames a field of color that reads as the tail’s own shimmer. The ocelli, which on a living bird are made by the structural color of the feather, are here made by glass set into gilt metal, and the glaze supplies the rest. The object divides the peacock between two materials and two factories, and the division is the design.

The mount came from a short-lived Nuremberg firm whose history is now well documented. Georg Friedrich Schmitt, a merchant, registered a pewter foundry in the Martin-Richter-Straße in April 1903 with three master craftsmen, applied for the ORION mark the following month, and modeled the enterprise closely on Walter Scherf’s Osiris works nearby, down to the cursive mark with a model number and the practice of mounting glass from Lötz and ceramics from Zsolnay in pewter set with glass stones. Friedrich Adler supplied designs; Valentin Oeckler is the only other designer whose name is known. Nuremberg had its own claim on the metal trades: the Saint Louis catalog of the Eidelberg collection notes that it was at the Nuremberg Metalwork Exhibition of 1885 that Japanese objects helped settle a German taste for the Oriental, in the same decade that the museums and design schools called for by Hermann Schwabe’s reform program were being founded across the country (Eidelberg, Conradsen, and Clancy 2026, pp. 85–86). Schmitt exhibited at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. At the beginning of 1906 the firm passed to Orivit AG of Cologne, which continued some sixty of its roughly 250 models, this one among them, under Orivit numbers.

Dating rests on three documents that agree. Orion’s model numbers were assigned in sequence between 1903 and 1905, and Pese’s scheme places numbers above 200 in 1904–1905. The model continued in production at Orivit as no. 2534 after 1906, so the Orion mark on this example fixes it to the Nuremberg years rather than the Cologne ones. And the Zsolnay body is form 7023 of the factory’s eleventh form book, compiled 1902–1904, which gives the vessel a terminus post quem consistent with the mount. The design belongs to the floral and figural Jugendstil that preceded the shift, visible across German production by the St. Louis fair of 1904, toward a more linear and geometric manner (Eidelberg, Conradsen, and Clancy 2026, p. 88): the berried ring at the neck, the fully modeled birds, and the feather-engraved foot are the vocabulary of 1900–1905, and the piece is one of the last fully naturalistic designs the firm produced under its own name.

The vessel came from Pécs, in southern Hungary, where the Zsolnay manufactory had developed its eosin glazes in the 1890s under Vilmos Zsolnay and the chemist Vince Wartha, and had made them the firm’s showpiece at the international exhibitions around 1900. Labrador, named for the iridescent feldspar, is the mottled green-and-gold variety. Zsolnay supplied blanks to Orion as it did to other mounters, and the published examples of model 272 all stand on the same lustered form, so the pairing was Orion’s standard specification rather than a one-off marriage. What varied was the finish: Pese’s example is silvered with multicolored stones, the Zons museum’s is gilt with multicolored stones, and the present vase is gilt with blue — the firm, as Pese records, supplied its wares bright, matte, patinated, silvered, or gilt to order. The ceramic is accordingly a Hungarian object and the mount a German one, and the record files the vase under both countries, with the text rather than the classification carrying the explanation.

The peacock arrived at Nuremberg already carrying its freight. By 1900 it had passed through the Aesthetic movement and Whistler’s Peacock Room, through Symbolist painting, and through the design press of every European country, and in the German journals of the 1890s it was as much a Jugendstil property as the thistle and the water lily. What the unnamed designer does with it is literal in a way the painted and glazed peacocks of the period are not: he gives the bird back its body, makes its tail the architecture of the piece, and sets its eyes in glass. The vase is one of the collection’s clearest cases of an animal supplying structure rather than decoration, and of a ceramic surface being read, by a designer in another material, as an animal’s own skin.

Comparative Note: French Art Nouveau Ceramics and the German Mounted Vase

The French ceramics at the center of this archive integrate glaze and form at the moment of firing. Dalpayrat’s collaborations with Voisin-Delacroix, Lachenal’s modeled animals, the Carriès circle’s accidents of the kiln: in each the sculptor works in the clay, and the glaze is discovered on the object rather than applied to it. Where the French mounted a ceramic in metal, the metal was most often a frame or a stand for the pot. But the Bestiaire holds the French exception that makes the comparison exact: the stoneware vase mounted with three gilt-bronze tortoises by the sculptor Max Blondat (1872–1925) and published by the dealer Lucien Moline of the Galerie Laffitte, 20 rue Laffitte, Paris (the first name is also recorded as Léonce) — an animal mount on a potter’s body, commissioned not by a factory but by a dealer-publisher who had edited Carabin’s ceramics from the mid-1890s and Bonnard’s lithographs alongside them.

The Orion–Zsolnay vase reverses the order. The ceramic is finished, glazed, and numbered in a form book before the mounter touches it; the animal is the metalworker’s; and the two are joined in a foundry rather than in a kiln. The Saint Louis catalog describes the German situation that produced this kind of object: a decorative-arts reform driven from above by state design schools and museums, by journals that carried international developments to every workshop, and by the cooperatives and the Werkbund that organized designers and industry together — a system in which, as the authors put it, Germany “had it all” (Eidelberg, Conradsen, and Clancy 2026, pp. 85–88). A culture of that kind tends toward modular collaboration between specialized firms, and the mounted eosin vase is its ceramic result: a Hungarian factory’s glaze, a Nuremberg factory’s mount, and a designer’s decision about how the two should meet — a decision that, in this case, outlived the firm that made it, since Orivit carried the model on after Orion had closed. The Blondat–Moline vase shows the French version of the same transaction, and the difference is instructive. In Paris the animal mount came through the sculptor–éditeur system: a named sculptor modeled the tortoises, a dealer-éditeur commissioned and sold the result, and the object carries the artist’s name as its identity. In Nuremberg the same operation ran factory to factory, under a trademark and a model number, with the designer’s name left unrecorded. Both put a metalworker’s animal on a potter’s pot; one credits the hand, the other the firm. The anonymities are mirror images: on the Paris vase the sculptor is named and the potter who threw the stoneware for Moline has never been identified; on the Nuremberg vase the potter is documented to a form-book number and the designer is unknown. Each tradition recorded the party it valued.

The contrast is not a hierarchy. The French objects ask what fire can be made to do to a form; this one asks what a designer can do with a surface another factory has already made. Both are Art Nouveau answers to the same question about the animal in the decorative arts, and the Bestiaire holds the second kind precisely so that the first can be seen against it.

Related Works

Within the Bestiaire the vase is one of a pair of peacocks. Its counterpart is Galileo Chini’s luster-glazed Vaso con pavoni of c. 1906–1910 from the Fornaci San Lorenzo, where three peacocks are drawn in cobalt contour on a plain ovoid and the luster itself performs the plumage: the Florentine vase makes the bird surface, the Nuremberg vase makes it structure, and read together they mark the range of what a peacock could be made to do to a lustered vessel. Auguste Delaherche’s plate with peacock-feather decoration is the outer limit of the same idea, plumage without the bird.

Among the French lusters, the Golfe-Juan wares of Clément Massier and Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer — the jellyfish cache-pot, the lobster charger, the spider vase — are the technical cousins of the Zsolnay body: metallic films developed at Golfe-Juan from the late 1880s, a few years before eosin at Pécs, and used there to draw the creature into the shimmer rather than to carry one in metal. The collection’s other German object, Franz Metzner’s Märchen for KPM Berlin, is the state manufactory’s answer to the private Kunstgewerbe firm: porcelain and flowing glazes from Berlin against gilt pewter from Nuremberg, the two poles of German production around 1900. The vase also belongs to a small Austro-Hungarian group in the collection — the Amphora and Dachsel pieces from Turn-Teplitz and the Serapis-Fayence plates from Vienna — of which it is the only Hungarian member. The collection’s one French mounted animal vase, Max Blondat’s stoneware with three gilt-bronze tortoises published by Lucien Moline (H 20.4 cm; the rare red-glazed version, the model otherwise recorded in speckled green), is the structural twin of the present piece from the other side of the Rhine — applied metal animals circling a ceramic body beneath a ring of cast foliage, a lotus wreath at Paris, berried stems at Nuremberg, the two objects made within a few years of each other for the same kind of interior.

Outside the collection, the model is recorded in three further examples: the silvered example with multicolored stones in a private collection published by Pese as Werk 157 and reproduced on his cover; the gilt example with multicolored stones in the KreisMuseum Zons, Dormagen (inv. Zi 8/18); and a gilt example appraised on public television in the United States (ex-collection Jack Sawyer, New Orleans and Waveland, Mississippi). The model’s immediate neighbor in the Orion series, the snail vase model 273 designed by Valentin Oeckler on Zsolnay form 7022 (Pese, Werk 158), is the same idea applied to a gastropod — a gilt snail climbing a lustered bottle beneath a ring of berried stems — and shows that the animal mount on a Zsolnay body was a line at Orion and not a single design.