Featured A carved Spanish coconut from 1778

I suspect it did, but it's long gone, sadly. I suspect that whatever latch was there might be responsible for the slight split near that hole. That maybe it caused some pressure on the wood.

 

might eventually mean that France - the lily - occupied some Spanish area in one of the colonies.

 

Ah - I was curious about that. Whether the lily as a flower had some metaphorical meaning.

Could it have been a romantic gift from a Spanish man to a French woman?

 

Lilies as represented in Spanish Colonial religious art.

Debora

 

Good question! I just tootled around the (Spanish) internet to see what lilies represented during period and whether your inscription was a quotation from a poem, for instance. (It isn't, not that I could find.) Lilies, when linked with roses, could signify hidden love. Or they could quite literally mean "white" as in "fair complexion." Given Colonial Spain's preoccupation with casta, I think that's more likely the meaning. The associated ideas would be: lineage, social standing, refinement... The qualities associated with being a "lady" in the British sense.

Debora

 

Charles III was ruling Spain in 1778. He was of the House of Bourbon.

Debora

 

Very interesting. Lots of fleur de lys (lilies) on the emblem of the House of Bourbon!

It would be amazing if it might have been a gift to someone of that family, which could take it beyond a purely romantic statement to maybe a gesture of subservience.

I noticed that Portugal ceded Equatorial Guinea to Charles III in 1778. Could there even be a possibility that it was a representation of that, if that was where the coconut came from?

 

That it was a gift to a member of the Bourbon family takes a great stretch of imagination. According to the internet, these were made in a number of places in Latin America, including what is now México and Guatemala. The execution may link it to a specific region but you'd need an expert to determine that.

Debora

 

Fleur-de-lys are pretty generic in parts of Europe, and would have been used as such in the colonies as well.
Below is the crest of one of my Dutch ancestral families, this one was already used in the late Middle Ages:



In the region they were from, east of the town of Utrecht, central Netherlands, many families had fleur-de-lys' in their family crest.

Btw, technically speaking, the fleur-de-lys isn't a lily, but an iris. The French fleur-de-lys' are said to have been inspired by the many irises of the beautiful Leie region of Flanders. Leie=lys.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montjoie_Saint_Denis!

 

For what it's worth, as I understand it, the coconut came from the collection of a guy called Charles Sarolea. A Belgian who used to hold the Belgian royal family in his social circle. Became Belgian consul to the UK. Organised the supporters of the Spanish fascists in the UK. Travelled Spain with Franco's fascists. Attended the Nuremberg Rally and met Adolf Hitler. And had a collection of over 120,000 books, including many 15th century incunabulae. So not your everyday collector...

 

This Charles Saroléa?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Saroléa

 

Yes - that's the guy.

 

Was he a Rexist ?
The the supporters of the Spanish fascists in the UK were mostly conservative industrialists that already had contact with Franco during the Asturian miners' strike in 34.
the Fascists were never really important but served Franco as a good link to Italy, Germany and all the other Fascist parties including Mosley. the army was important in Spain.

 

I was reading this about him:

https://research-repository.st-andr...d=762280735940AAB73458D1A20367F76F?sequence=1

It doesn't say whether he was a member of the Rexist party in Belgium, but he seems to have done a lot of PR for Mussolini and Franco in the UK. Lots of anti-League of Nations writing. And it sounds like he travelled around Spain with the fascists there.

 

Given his presumed erudition, I can't conceive of anything other than that he knew perfectly well what the inscription said, so that when your grandmother singled it out as something she liked, it tickled him to give it to her.

 

This one started out at $500 & ended at $1,700.

 

Funny, isn't it? They don't appear to be of great value but they're extraordinary looking. And there are all sorts of other carved and mounted coconut objects from the same period. None of which I've ever paid much attention to in past.

Debora

 

thank you for the link. it shows that the lower classes weren't the working ones intellectually... it was rather the gentry, that seems to have been deranged and used all their force to keep influence on the public opinion and their investiments for their easy living by their blarney about the situation on the continent.
modern historians class the Franco era rather as a military dictatorship with the typical attributes of Juntas.
Mussolini and others were strictly against "the" Church and would have closed down the Vatican if they didn't need the masses.
there's a good book of Ian Kershaw about Lord Londonderry that shows another level of weirdo-ism in those years.

 

Quite - You've probably seen already, but from what I have gathered, up to the late 18th century, coconuts were quite rare and expensive in North America and Europe. As such exotic objects, it seems that they would make extra effort in the carving and would often ornament with silver.

From around 1800, coconuts were easily available, so their intrinsic value dropped, and as such, any additional ornamentation tended to be pewter.

I get the impression there are a few main variants:

1. Items carved traditionally communities where coconuts are native. A lot of animals, using the eyes of the coconut as eyes.
2. Items carved for wealthy colonials, using European styles and techniques. Ornamented to European tastes. I get the impression they were usually carved in those colonies rather than in Europe. Maybe because the flesh of the coconut is softer when it's fresh?
3. Scrimshaw work by sailors on long journeys, using coconuts they found in West Africa, the Caribbean and India. Often evidence of the slave trade - I'm guessing some were picked up by sailors in West Africa, to pass the time on the journey to the Caribbean and back. There are also a number made by American naval sailors, after the abolition of the slave trade. They would patrol off the coast of West Africa for months, hunting down ships trying to take more slaves across the Atlantic.
4. Silly animals and reproductions of "tribal" objects produced for tourists in the modern day.