Letter from London

by Ian McKay, e-mail: <ianmckay1@btinternet.com>

Creating the Faces of Immortality

When Congress and the Virginia Legislature voted in 1784 to honour George Washington by commissioning a life-size equestrian statue, Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to suggest that the French sculptor, Jean-Antoine Houdon, would be the best man for the job.

A painted portrait was in due course sent to Paris to act as a model, but Houdon, who had long cherished the idea of producing a heroic monument on this scale and regarded the commission as the most important of his career, felt that copying someone else's portrait would simply not do. He volunteered instead to travel to America and meet his illustrious subject face to face.

Houdon spent 17 days in all at Mount Vernon, studying the man he was to immortalise. He even took careful measurements with callipers and produced a life mask that he took back with him to Paris. By December 1786, Houdon had produced a bust that he first showed in his studio, then exhibited at the Paris Salon in the following year.

The original plan for an equestrian statue was eventually abandoned in favour of the less expensive but still imposing marble standing figure of Washington that was erected in the Capitol Building at Richmond in 1792, but Houdon also went on to produce a number of variants of his original portrait bust. These showed Washington bare-chested, in the antique style; wearing a simple shirt and scarf, or with a tunic and toga, as in the terra-cotta example seen here.

These different versions would have been produced in the sculptor's own workshops, and Houdon would have overseen the finishing himself. Signed and dated 1787, the example seen in a Sotheby's sale of July 9 was sold for a low estimate $488,025.

Veneration of Ludwig van Beethoven among Europe's fin-de-siècle artists peaked in 1902, when, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of his death, the Vienna Secession exhibition of that year was dedicated entirely to the composer. Leading contributors included Max Klinger, who unveiled a large polychrome monument to Beethoven on which he had been working since the 1880's, and Gustav Klimt, who showed his Wagner influenced Beethoven Frieze, a visualisation of the Ninth Symphony.

The gilt and painted stucco head of the composer seen here was the contribution of Franz von Stuck, cofounder of the Munich Succession, who had produced the first version of this painted plaster portrait in 1900. Very few examples are recorded, though there is one in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and one other has made a couple of auction appearances in recent times-most recently as part of the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum collection at Sotheby's New York in May 1994.

The example featured here came up for sale at Sotheby's in London on June 2 and sold for a double estimate $81,730.

Cabinetmaking for Privileged Children

This George I walnut, crossbanded and featherbanded cabinet is an impressive and imposing piece, wouldn't you say? Well, certainly impressive, but this fine piece is actually a scaled-down version of the real thing and stands only 4' high!

Miniature pieces of this period (the 1720-30s) are rare, and if the theory that they were made for the children of the rich is correct, then this miniature nursery cabinet, which spent most of its life at Tredegar House in Monmouthshire, may well have been commissioned by Sir William Morgan, the local member of parliament, for a son and namesake who was born in 1725.

Sir William, who had certainly married well in taking as his bride Rachel Cavendish, a daughter of the immensely wealthy Duke of Devonshire, was known for his extravagance—his accounts for the year in which young William was born amounting to a sum equivalent to almost $5 million in today's terms. So such an unlikely present would have been quite in keeping with his lavish lifestyle.

Sadly, Sir William did not live long to enjoy his good and great fortune. By the time he was six, young William had acquired far more than just this splendid miniature cabinet; he had inherited the entire Tredegar estate. His father, Sir William, died in 1731 at age 31.

Although records (if not the originals) exist of furniture supplied by cabinetmakers to George I's own children, few comparable pieces of children's furniture of this date are known. This cabinet remained at Tredegar House until 1951, when the family left the ancestral home. The old Morgan family home then served as a school for 20 years before passing into the care of Newport City Council, who now manage the house and gardens as a tourist attraction and as a conference centre and wedding venue.

The miniature cabinet made its first auction appearance at Christie's in 1957, and half a century on returned to London to sell for $112,750 in a Bonhams sale of June 24.

Millet at His Most Sensuous

Alexandra Murphy, an art historian and internationally recognised expert on Millet, who assisted Sotheby's in the cataloguing of this drawing by Jean-François Millet, described it as "…one of the most beautiful drawings of the nude that Millet made, as well as one of the most sensuous images of mid-nineteenth century French art."

There is evidence that the 8 1/8" x 10 7/8" drawing, executed in charcoal and stumping (a process by which the drawing is softened by use of a short, pointed piece of leather, paper, or other material), changed hands a number of times during the 19th century, but its whereabouts since it was exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 remain more of a mystery.

Its return to the open market on July 8 showed that there are those who would second Murphy's views on its quality, for against an estimate of $12,000/18,000, it went on to sell for $173,100.

Gothic Revival Firedogs

"Pugin and the Gothic Revival," a special sale devoted to the design work of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852) held by Bonhams on July 15, was not a complete success—barely half of the 184 lots were sold—but in a month that features Gainsborough and Landseer pictures, how could I resist a pair of Gothic Revival firedogs.

Manufactured, as was so much of his work, by his great friend John Hardman, these nearly 35" high firedogs were part of Pugin's last major commission-for an extensive redecoration of Abney Hall at Cheadle in Cheshire that was undertaken in the mid-1850's by Pugin's friend and collaborator, John Gregory Crace-and all in preparation for a visit by Victoria's consort, Prince Albert. Later photographs show these brass and polished steel firedogs standing on either side of the magnificent drawing-room fireplace.

In later years Abney Hall was owned by Agatha Christie's brother-in-law and served as a model for the grand country houses that feature in her books, but in 1958 the hall was sold to the local council and the contents dispersed in a sale that stretched over 11 days.

The firedogs were sold at Bonhams for $14,580, but two of the more highly valued lots, a brass hexafoil corona ceiling light and a two-tone brass floor-standing Paschal stick that in recent times were to be found among the Gothic Revival interiors of Cher's home in Malibu, California, were left unsold. The contents of the Malibu house had been sold by Sotheby's and Julien's Auctions in 2006.

A Global Market Boom?

Globes have a habit of upsetting the estimate apple cart-or at least they do when sold as part of fine furnishings sales. When sold in larger numbers and as part of specialist sales, such good results have not always been easy to come by, and the one salesroom which once held regular globe and planetaria sales, Christie's South Kensington, dropped them as part of a rationalisation and tightening up of their collectors' sales calendar.

The little pocket globes now tend to find their way into book sales, but the smarter table globes and the big library globes are probably best sold with the fine furniture.

A Christie's furniture sale of July 9, for example, presented a pair of large terrestrial and celestial library globes bearing the name of one of the most famous of all map and globe making families. Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571-1638) was not the first European globe manufacturer, nor indeed the first of the celebrated Amsterdam globe makers-the van Langrens had set up business there in the 1590's-but it was Blaeu's firm that made globe production a truly commercial enterprise, and over a 40-year career, Willem himself produced some of the finest of all early globes.

The son of a herring merchant of Alkmaar, the young Willem began his working life as a clerk in his father's trade, but in the winter of 1595-96 he went to study with the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe at his observatory at Urienborg. On his return to Alkmaar, he made a 13" diameter celestial globe for the mathematician Adriaan Anthoisz, a globe that was based in part on information gathered by Brahe for his then unpublished star catalogue. Then in 1598-99 Blaeu moved to Amsterdam and set up the publishing, map making, and globe making business that was to make his name famous around the world and that now earned him a living.

The terrestrial globe of the pair seen upper left is dated 1622, but Blaeu had first issued his 26" diameter library globes in 1616, in a move to go bigger and better than one of his rivals. In 1613, the Hondius firm had issued a pair of 21" diameter globes.

These new globes confirmed the Blaeu name as the best there was in globe making, and they remained the largest obtainable for some 70 years—until Vincenzo Maria Coronelli upped the stakes in 1688 with a pair of 43" diameter globes. Blaeu's 26" globes were republished three times during the 17th century to incorporate discoveries made on the voyages of Schouten and Le Maire, Baffin, and others. Even the celestial globes were updated, and the example in this pair dates to circa 1630.

This London pair was probably acquired towards the end of his life by Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland (1564-1632), whose patronage of natural philosophers and abiding interest in all matters alchemical and scientific earned him the nickname of "The Wizard Earl." A Molyneux globe of 1592 that the Wizard Earl took with him to the Tower of London when he was imprisoned for many years on suspicion of having been associated in some way with Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot still survives at Petworth House in Sussex, and these Blaeu globes, too, were at Petworth until 1968. Sold at Christie's some 17 years later, they were added to and have now been sold from the extensive collections of Jaime Ortiz-Patiño.

In April of last year, a pair of Blaeu's 26" library globes from the Liechtenstein princely collections was given a $300,000/440,000 estimate and sold for $1,245,590 at Christie's Amsterdam, so to find this London pair valued at only $90,000/150,000 was somewhat surprising. The celestial globes of both pairs were dated to circa 1630, but while the terrestrial globe of the Liechtenstein pair was an example of the final state example of 1645-48, issued after Willem's death, the London example was a third state version of 1630-45, of which just 14 examples are recorded.

It is, however, the finer, or as it might be the rougher, points of condition that account for the big price difference. I am told that though cleaning had led to some uncertainty in the minds of the cataloguers as to the age of the stands on the Liechtenstein globes, which are parcel gilt and grained to imitate rosewood, it is now accepted that they are of the period, though the black-painted iron meridian rings were still described as later.

It appears that the celestial globe of the Liechtenstein pair had suffered quite substantial damage and loss in places-a result of shrapnel, according to one story-but overall, the Liechtenstein globes were in much better and more original condition than the London pair.

Though the Christie's catalogue description gave little away, there was in fact quite a bit of loss and replacement or filling in on the London globes, especially on the terrestrial globe. For example, one of the gores, those shaped paper sections that make up the printed surface, was of different colour and a facsimile. A difference in weight also suggested that the original plaster sphere of the terrestrial globe had been replaced by a wooden sphere-the gores being removed and then repositioned.

All in all, these were globes in need of extensive restoration, and that had to be taken into account by buyers. Nevertheless, the estimate on this London pair was surely much, much too low, especially given the Wizard Earl provenance. Supported on contemporary oak and walnut stands with paper-covered horizon rings and with engraved brass meridian rings, the pair went on to sell to a collector at $465,403.

Even more of a dramatic increase on estimate was seen for a single 36" diameter library globe of circa 1840 (right) that had been valued at just $30,000/45,000 in a Sotheby's sale of July 7.

This terrestrial globe in its shaped mahogany stand was a previously unrecorded reissue of John Addison's "Terraqueous" globe of circa 1825. Later reissues of the globe by Thomas Malby (1849) and by James Wyld, who in the 1860's paired it with a celestial globe, are known, but no one seems to have realised that in 1840, or thereabouts, the globe drawn up by the little-known Addison had been reissued in slightly revised and updated form by George & John Cary, whose Strand (London) premises were at the time the most famous centre of globe making in the land.

Perhaps more significantly, this Addison-Cary globe was totally untouched and had been in the same place since new; it even came with the original invoice. It was sent for sale by Jesus College in Oxford, and when the Carys supplied it to the Rev. Thomas Davies they billed the college for £41-about $65 at today's exchange rates. That was a tidy sum in its day, but one rather dwarfed by the bid of $332,505 needed to secure it this summer.

Gainsborough and Landseer Let the Dogs Out

Gainsborough may be best known for his society portraits and landscapes, but as a countryman (he hailed from Sudbury in Suffolk) he had a fondness for dogs and included them in a great many of his paintings. He also painted around a dozen portraits of individual dogs, and one of his earlier attempts in this field was a 1745 portrait of a dog called Bumper, a dog that he described on the back of the canvas as "a most remarkable sagacious cur," but most of his canine sitters seem to have been the favourite pets of his clients and thus special commissions.

Pugs were a popular breed in the 18th century, and though the most famous pug in art must be Trump, Hogarth's dog, Gainsborough would have been very familiar with the breed. There is a 1780-85 Portrait of a Pug belonging to Jonathan Spilsbury which clearly identifies his subject and client, but the identity of the pug portrait that sold for a much, much higher than predicted $1,601,914 at Sotheby's on July 9 remains a mystery.

What this and other portraits of the age do tell us is that the 18th-century pugs appear to have been larger than they are today and to have had longer legs, less curly tails, and more extended muzzles.

Sir Edwin Landseer (1802-1873), of course, spent much of his life producing animalscapes and portraits, but the oil of The Champion: Venus… that made $524,563 in the same Sotheby's sale was one of his earlier canvasses. Landseer was just 17 years old when he got the commission from Venus' owner, Sir Henry Dymoke, but then his client was only a year older.

The Newfoundland breed was very much in favour in the early decades of the 19th century, featuring prominently in sporting art and in family portraiture as a pet, and this particular type of Newfoundland, with its white coat and dappled black spots, came to be known as a Landseer from its frequent appearance in the artist's pictures.

When first exhibited at the British Institution in 1819, the picture was not yet called The Champion, the title it bears in engraved versions, but it seems that this title refers not to any prize that Venus may have won but to the Dymoke family's hereditary title of King's Champion. This ancient ceremony, which is first recorded at the accession of Richard II in the 14th century but is doubtless of greater age, required the bearer of the title to ride into Westminster Hall on the occasion of a monarch's coronation and challenge all comers to impugn the king's title.

Young Sir Henry, Venus' master, held the title of King's Champion in place of his father, who felt the title to be incompatible with his standing as a senior churchman. Two years after Landseerz painted Venus, Sir Henry acted as King's Champion at the coronation of George IV, but that was the last occasion on which the old ceremony was held.

Lord of the Rings

Found near St. Oswald's church at Winwick in Cheshire, this English sapphire-set gold ring has decoration of flowers and leaves and is inscribed to the inside with the legend Joye Sanz Fyn (Joy without End). Dated by the British Museum to the late 14th or early 15th century, it was subsequently declared to be treasure trove (in which treasure that has been lost and not claimed or voluntarily abandoned is allowed to be kept by the first finder).

At Sotheby's on July 9 it sold for a much higher than expected $114,775.

Lute Duo Are Unexpected Chart Toppers

An instrumental duo featured in the summer's Old Master sales in London produced winning bids that were far, far in excess of anything that the salesrooms had imagined possible.

Illustrated at left is an anonymous portrait of a gentleman playing a lute that while once thought to be by Van Dyck can only really be said to be an Anglo-Flemish school picture of the early to mid-1620's. There is, however, a fair amount of evidence to suggest that the subject is none other than Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666), a lutenist, viol player, and singer who in the 1620's was appointed the first Master of the King's Musick, the royal court band.

The shape of the sitter's nose, which suggests a break at some time, is distinctive and common to all other known or supposed portraits of Lanier, and the ring he wears is very similar to that seen in a genuine Van Dyck portrait that now hangs in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna.

The lute would be appropriate to Lanier, and a case can also be made for the inscriptions on paper on the table pointing to Lanier as a subject, while the statuette, a reduced version of the celebrated Belvedere Antinous, may be a reference to another of Lanier's court duties. King Charles I appointed Lanier his principal picture agent, and he made more than one visit to Italy to arrange the purchase of collections for his royal patron and employer. During the English Civil War, Lanier fled to continental Europe, but at the restoration of Charles II was reinstalled to his old post and held it until his death six years later.

In a Christie's sale of July 8, the picture was valued at just $46,000/ 75,000 but sold for no less than $717,300!

Next to the supposed Lanier portrait we have a young man playing a theorbo lute, one of the larger forms of the instrument. Signed and dated 1646 by Jacob van Oost of Bruges, it shows us a musician whose name, most likely, will forever remain unknown, but the later history of the painting is much clearer. A forebear of the vendor at a Bonhams sale of July 8 was Jean-François Michiels, a pioneer photographer who taught the new art to the Crown Prince of Prussia, the future Emperor Frederick III, and later travelled to St. Petersburg to make a photographic record of the major paintings in the Hermitage.

Whilst in St. Petersburg, Michiels acquired a number of paintings, mostly by Dutch and Flemish masters and including works by David Teniers the Younger and Frans Hals, as well as this van Oost portrait.

Bonhams put an estimate of just $80,000/130,000 on the oil, but the good provenance, untouched condition, and the simple fact that the artist is now seldom seen at auction worked strongly in its favour. It ended up selling for a record $1,012,175 to French & Co. of New York City.

The Carrega-Cataldi Settees-Reminders of a Gilded Age

Though they spent a great many years in a mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City, this stunning pair of Italian carved giltwood settees were made in the mid-18th century for one of the most sumptuous rococo interiors ever created in their country of origin.

They were once part of the famous Galleria Dorata (the Golden or Gilded Gallery) of the Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi in Genoa, a room created in the exuberant and flamboyant rococo style that seems to have been the brainchild of Lorenzo de Ferrari (1680-1744). In the last years of his life, he designed for the then owners, the Carrega family, a room that would rival the great French interiors of the age-although his was a rather less frothy interpretation of the rococo that looked ahead to the stiffer neo-classical tastes of the later 18th century.

De Ferrari was not, of course, personally responsible for all the stucco decoration, the mirrors, the furnishings, etc., and the name of Domenico Parodi has been linked with these settees, which originally stood below the four large mirrors on the two long walls and were part of seating arrangements that also included a set of 18 gilt-decorated chairs.

Then in the late 19th century, the American architect Stanford White, who travelled extensively in Europe purchasing architectural elements and furnishings for the homes of his wealthy clients, acquired the entire movable contents of the Galleria Dorata. Four settees, four pairs of mirrored doors, a pair of consoles, and a set of 18 chairs were all shipped back to the U.S., and though he hung on to a couple of doors for his own use, everything else was sold on to the lawyer, politician, and businessman William Collins Whitney, whose home at 871 Fifth Avenue he was in the process of transforming into a veritable palace—at a cost over $4 million!

The pieces from the Galleria Dorata were installed on the second floor, in what was then the largest private ballroom in New York. In fact, so much larger was it than the room in the Palazzo Carrega, the settees had to be lengthened.

When Whitney died in 1904, the mansion—not to mention a very useful oil fortune—passed to his son Harry, and at Harry's death in 1930, the Galleria Dorata furnishings passed in turn to his wife, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, daughter of the financier Cornelius Vanderbilt and herself a major patron of the arts.

The furnishings can still be seen in place in a photograph of the ballroom taken in the early 1940's, just prior to Gertrude's death, but the settees next come into public view in a Sotheby's London sale of 1998. At a date unknown they had been acquired by Count Volpi di Misurata and returned to Italy for installation in the Palazzo Volpi in Rome.

A diplomat, politician, and leading industrialist, Count Volpi was a man who owned a number of splendid residences in or close to Rome, as well as a home on the Grand Canal in Venice, but in 1951 the Countess Volpi had set about renovating the Roman palazzo, so it was probably around this time that the settees found their way back to Italy. Tastes change, however, and by the time of that 1998 sale, the settees had been in storage and unseen for at least 25 years.

In the 1998 sale, the pair that came back to Sotheby's this July 7 was sold for $176,400 (the second pair went to another collector at $159,600), but this summer the price for a pair was $721,305.

And what of the other pieces from the Galleria Dorata?

The mirrored doors are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the console tables in the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art. The set of 18 chairs had by the 1930's moved from the Whitney mansion to the Patiño family collections in Portugal, but reemerged earlier this year in Paris, when as part of the fabulous collections of the late Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé the set sold at €961,000 ($1,225,360).

The palazzo itself, originally built in the 16th century for one of the great Genoese families of the Renaissance, the Pallavicinos, again changed hands in 1830, when it was sold by the Carregas to the Cataldi family. Almost a century later, in 1922, it was taken over by the Genoese Chamber of Commerce, but in 1942 suffered considerable damage during wartime bombardment. The mirrored doors and consoles now on display in the Galleria Dorata, which was repaired and restored over a long period, are copies, and the settees have been replaced by simpler Genoese giltwood examples.

Marks Out of Ten?

The design would not be clear in a standard size reproduction of this Arts and Crafts sideboard or rose-water dish, but the enlarged detail, I hope, shows the salmon that swim amidst stylised water lilies around the border. A Britannia standard silver-gilt piece with a diameter of 16 5/8", it was made in London in 1899 by Gilbert Marks (1861-1905), and at Bonhams on July 8 it sold for a treble estimate $68,040.

Flowers, fruit, and foliage were Marks' preferred decorative theme, but his work is also known for soft, fluid finishes, as evidenced in this large dish.

Illuminating Insights into the Middle Ages

Finally, a little self-indulgence, if I may. Though I am never likely to own a single leaf, I am fascinated by early illuminated manuscripts and hope that readers will fall in with my wish to bring this month's "Letter from London" to an end with something from the summer manuscript sales in London.

Sold for a total of $729,082 at Christie's on June 3 were three of the seven missing miniatures from Les Miracles de Nostre Dame, the second volume of a compilation on the life of the Virgin produced in the mid-15th century for Philip the Good of Burgundy by the scribe Jean Miélot. More precisely, these missing miniatures came from an additional, textually revised and more lavishly illustrated version of the second volume that Philip commissioned-a version illustrated with miniatures by one of the great Netherlandish illuminators of the age, Lieven van Lathem.

An outstanding narrative painter, van Lathem was a superb draughtsman and master of a technique that used flecks of paint and liquid gold to vary the colour and tone of the en grisaille townscapes and landscapes that he invested with carefully observed and realistic figures.

Following Philip's death in 1467, all three volumes continued to be housed in the Bibliothèque de Bourgogne in the royal palace in Brussels, but at some later date the original first volume (now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford) was removed, and it is assumed that the two versions of the second volume were among the manuscripts from the Bibliothèque de Bourgogne seized by the French in 1794.

These two manuscript volumes in their 18th-century bindings were not among those books returned to Brussels following a restitution agreement of 1814, and they remain to this day in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. At some stage eight leaves, containing a total of seven miniatures, were removed from the version illustrated by van Lathem, and it was three of these long-lost miniature masterpieces that reemerged at the King Street salesrooms this summer. Though not so identified at the time, they were once part of the great library of Sir Henry Hope Edwardes of Wootton Hall at Ashbourne in Derbyshire—sold by Christie's in 1901.

Two of them, "The Miracle of the Boy Who Offered His Bread to the Christ Child" and "The Miracle of the Academic Saved from Sin by Reciting Ave Maria," were valued at $50,000/65,000 each but sold for $321,568 apiece to a specialist dealer, Dr. Jörn Günther of Hamburg, Germany. The third, the "Miracle of the Adulterous Woman's Repentance," went to an American institution at $85,946.

One of the great vernacular chronicles of the 15th century was among the highlights of a Sotheby's manuscript sale of July 7.

The merchant and diplomat Eberhard Windeck's Das Buch von Kaiser Sigmund… is a major source for the life of one of the more powerful European figures of his age, the Nuremberg-born Sigismund of Luxembourg (1368-1437), who was also King of Hungary, Germany, Bohemia, and Lombardy and, from 1433 to 1437, the Holy Roman Emperor.

Probably made for Matthias Ebner of Nuremberg, who, like Windeck, had spent many years in the emperor's service, the chronicle is both a swashbuckling romance and an intimate and deeply well-informed account of Sigismund's life by a man who knew him well. Containing no fewer than 174 very large or full-page illustrations, it includes records of Sigismund's extensive travels and his involvement in events major and minor.

The Hussite wars, for example—including a good illustrated piece on the burning of the reformer, Jan Hus, in 1415—find a place, along with stories of attempted poisonings and endless political intrigue. In fact, it contains all the fun of medieval court life and warfare.

The author being a Mainz man, there is also a reference, in connection with a document of arbitration drawn up by the Archbishop of Mainz, to a certain Hennecken zu Guttenberg, at the time "absent from the city." Hennecken is a diminutive of Johann, but at this date there was of course no recognition of the world-changing enterprise on which Windeck's fellow citizen—if it was indeed that same Johann Gutenberg—had embarked.

At one time in the vast collections formed in the 19th century by Sir Thomas Phillipps, this illustrated biography was among the huge cache of remaining manuscripts from his library acquired in one of the deals of the century by dealers Philip and Lionel Robinson (in 1946) and later passed to H.P. Kraus, who in a 1978 catalogue called "In Retrospect" described this manuscript of 1440-50 as among the greatest manuscripts he had ever handled. Bought from Kraus in 1954 by a collector, it was sent for sale by a descendant. It sold for $1,884,895.

The illustrations also include what are believed to be the earliest depictions of Joan of Arc (who had been in contact with Sigismund in 1429, just prior to leading a French army against the English), but I have chosen to feature instead two rather more lively images that have a fishy connection.

Login or Register to post a Comment