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Style Art Nouveau / Ref.3616

Rare Art Nouveau ceramic fireplace with cat

Dimensions:
Width: 44'' ½  113cm
Height: 42'' ½  108cm
Depth: 15'' ¾  40cm
Inner width: 25'' ¼  64cm
Inner height: 28'' ¾  73cm

Origin:
Circa 1900, France.

Status:
In good condition. Some usual restorations. The cat was manufactured recently.

This rare Art Nouveau fireplace made out of enamelled stoneware was realised around 1900, in the taste of Hector Guimard or Alexandre Bigot. Indeed, various copies of this fireplace were produced, certainly to take advantage of the trend around Guimard’s creations at the end of the 19th century, in particular after the construction, quite broadcasted, of the Castel Béranger in Paris in 1898.

The opening of the hearth, shaped like a horseshoe arch, is flanked by two slender jambs adorned with foliages, with mascarons in the bottom part. The center of the lintel is decorated with a bas-relief depicting a bizarre cat arching her back and with a muzzle like a duck’s beak. This cat appears as an evocation of the one adorning the bottom of the corner turet of the Castel Béranger, Parisian building embodying the development of Art Nouveau in French architecture. This same cat was already visible on Guimard’s Pavilion for the Exposition de la Céramique et de tous les Arts du Feu of 1897 (Exhibition of Ceramics and every other Arts of the Fire).

A similar fireplace atrtibuted to Muller, is exhibited in the new room dedicated to the Art Nouveau in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs of Paris