Perfume-bottle holder
/https://agsa-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/media/dd/images/19595-HQ-8810A20A.25deec4.jpg)
Australia
c.1860 – 1884
Perfume-bottle holder
c 1875
emu egg, silver, silver gilt interior, Queensland beans
- Place made
- Adelaide
- Medium
- emu egg, silver, silver gilt interior, Queensland beans
- Dimensions
- 33.5 x 24.0 x 11.8 cm
- Credit line
- Gift of Southern Farmers Group Ltd in its centenary year 1988 through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation 1988
- Accession number
- 8810A20A
- Signature and date
- Impressed under base "[lion passant]", "H. STEINER", "[queen's head]".
- Media category
- Metalwork
- Collection area
- Australian decorative arts and design
-
From the early 1980s, Stephen Bowers began to apply an elaborate and sumptuous style of surface decoration to ceramics, a style that makes use of the techniques of fine painting in combination with layers of coloured glazes and lustre. Originating from a wide range of sources, his imagery varies in content from subjects drawn from popular Australian culture and flora and fauna, to that directly referencing European art traditions, especially the porcelain decoration of the eighteenth century. He frequently juxtaposes unlikely combinations of images, and in Antipodean palaceware selects them from two main sources – European historic pattern design and Australian flora and fauna.
This large vase, one of a pair, was made by potter Mark Heidenreich in Sydney in 1989 using especially prepared clays. In 1994 Bowers finished decorating the first vase, now in the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney. This second vase, decorated in 1998, features sulphur-crested cockatoos, scrolling vine with banksia seeds and eucalyptus leaves amongst a smorgasbord of cultural references drawn directly from the history of international ceramics.
Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design
-
This peculiar colonial South Australia object finds its historic roots in the elaborate gold- and silver-mounted ostrich eggs popular in Renaissance Europe. The perfume-bottle holder features a mounted emu egg, which opens along a vertical axis to reveal two mounted perfume bottles, on top of which sits an emu. At the base of the object are three interpretations of allegorical Aboriginal people underneath a fern canopy. Such elaborate objects in silver became popular in colonial Australia and took the form of dramatic centrepieces, epergnes and presentation pieces and demonstrate the country’s newfound nationalistic confidence, as well as the great wealth generated by the Victorian gold rush of the early 1850s.
The manufacture of colonial gold and silver across the country was largely due to émigré designers from continental Europe. In South Australia the best work in gold and silver was dominated by the silversmiths who had fled Prussian persecution of Protestantism. This Perfume-bottle holder dates to the mid-1870s and was created by Henry Steiner, one of the finest designers of the period. Steiner was born in Rodenberg, near Hanover, in 1835, emigrating to Adelaide in 1858, where, in 1860, he set up his business in Rundle Street. A prolific artist, Steiner worked in the international style of naturalism – infused with local motifs and imagery. He exhibited his work widely in the numerous intercolonial and international exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design
-
[Book] AGSA 500.