Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Her Majesty’s Furniture: A Russian Pietra Dura Table, 1844

Pietra Dura Table
Carl Johan Tegelstein, 1844
The Royal Collection
Pietra Dura—a mosaic of hard stone—has long been a popular medium for Russian artists. This heavily carved, bas relief Pietra Dura tabletop was a gift from Tsar Nicolas I to Queen Victoria upon the occasion of his official state visit in June of 1844. The table’s gilt bronze base comes from the high-end English Shop of Nichols and Plincke in St. Petersburg. The top--designed by Carl Johan Tegelstein--depicts a floral composition surrounded by a "Greek Key" border.


Recently, a similar table by the same artist from The Winter Palace sold at auction for £916,000 (about $1.4 million). The top of that table is pictured below.






1 comment:

SherR said...

An interesting peice, but some of the very best work of this sort was done in Florence at end of 1700s. Artists there specialised in creating immensely complicated pictures, with the colours (even tiny variations in colours, such as the folds on a coat) made from different semi-precious stones. Nice to see the art continued into the 1800s.