Sigrid Af Forselles, Vase, ca 1900, © Yann Girault
Sigrid Af Forselles, Vase, Detail, ca 1900, © Arnaud Carpentier - Didier Hermann
Sigrid Af Forselles, Vase, Side, ca 1900, © Yann Girault
Sigrid Af Forselles, Vase, Detail, ca 1900, © Yann Girault
Sigrid Af Forselles
Unique piece
Further images
RESERVED
RESERVED
Provenance
Hôtel des Ventes Galerie Moderne, Brussels, 27th February 2018, lot 469 - Trebosc + Van Lelyveld Gallery, Paris, until 2023.
Exhibitions
Forselles presented two decorated urns at the 1900 Woman’s Exhibition in London and won a medal for them. Helena Westermarck tells us that one of them was ‘The Voyage of Mankind’, but the subject of the second urn is not known. Given the fact that the Porvoo Museum example was made in 1905, and assuming that the four listed below were considered by Forselles to be her most important pieces, it is possible that ‘Jacob’s Dream’ was in fact the second one presented at
the London Woman’s Exhibition in 1900. Ours is also the only known urn to be undated. This could indicate it may have been among her early creations and therefore could have been shown in 1900.
Publications
Forselles began experimenting on ‘decoratedurns’ shortly before 1900, and the latest knownexample is dated 1909. Only a handful ofexamples were made, and the pieces with biblicalscenes are particularly rare. The first mention ofher urns can be found in a 1904 article by V.Lindman from the Swedish magazine Idun. Thesecond came in 1937 in a landmark biography ofForselles by her close friend and long timesupporter Helena Westermarck. She gives adescription of several urns on page 138, incudingfour with biblical scenes : Jacob’s Dream (orJacob’s Ladder), which we presume to be our urn,Christ surrounded by his Apostles, David playing the Harp for Saül, and ‘The Voyage of Mankind’. The Porvoo Museum in Finland was given in 1936 what we believe to be the Christ surrounded by his Apostles urn (Inv n°36-167). The whereabouts of the other two urns described by Westermarck are unknown. Two other vases are recorded today, one in the collection of the Turun Taidemuseo in Turku, Finland, the other in the collection of the Loviisa Town Museum in Loviisa, Finland.Join our mailing list
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