Style Orientalism / Ref.16209

BROCARD Philippe-Joseph (in the style of) — Footed cup in blown glass with enamel and gilt decoration in the perso-islamic taste

Philippe-Joseph Brocard, originally a restorer of works of art, developed a passion for Islamic glassware and rediscovered the process of hard coloured enamels fired in full, once mastered by the glassmakers of Syria in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. He presented his first enamelled pieces at the Universal Exhibition of 1867 in Paris, drawing the admiration of Émile Gallé. His works entered the collections of the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. This footed cup in blown glass with a lightly smoked wall is decorated with a covering design in two registers. The wide, flared rim is treated with a network of arabesque scrollwork in intense cobalt blue enamel, outlined with gilt fillets and scattered with small floral motifs in gold on a translucent ground, drawing direct inspiration from Persian and Ottoman faience tiles. The marli is animated with a frieze of geometric architectural motifs in gold. The interior well presents an eight-branched rosette in white enamel, framing a central medallion on a vivid red ground decorated with an inscription in stylised Kufic characters enamelled in blue. The footing in clear glass is left undecorated. The decoration, through its palette — cobalt blue, iron red, gold, white — and its ornamental syntax drawn directly from the arts of medieval Islam, is fully in keeping with the orientalist taste as defined and popularised by Brocard in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.