Cameo Signature Help Needed

@Jivvy Notice 2 locations for Mouhé. And the Schmolls are fab(ricants), not graveurs.

 

While I can't believe I didn't think to look for Schmoll (!) in that book, I did try to sort out the asterisk.

As per usual, my French is not as good as I think it is and I got nowhere.

 

You know, that was in my first Mouhé discovery post... I just didn't know it.

So at one shop, the touristy bits (that we now know are everywhere), and the other shop, the "writing ladies" based on classic sculpture.

Edit: Obviously, just tossing out ideas that we will likely never be proven right or wrong.

 

I know that the first time I found Charles it was just him, it was in English, and he was listed as a "cameo cutter" -- are you thinking the Schmolls did not work in stone?

 

Still nada for Mouhé in my search...
But I found a watch for you, Bronwen, in this Breguet gallery
http://fr.worldtempus.com/article/m...guet-lart-du-camee-23793.html#&gid=null&pid=8

 

Mouhé is recorded as having worked in both, but Schmoll seems only to have worked in shell. I have never seen a Schmoll that demonstrated the level of skill needed to do decent work in stone, while my best Mouhés show a high degree of attainment.

Never know what we'll find. I sometimes go back & run searches I thought I had exhausted previously & find new stuff. Things are being added to the Internet all the time, including digitized documents & auction results. We know both the correct words & the common misreadings, improving our chances of success.

 

Frankly, because of the inherent flaws of OCR (optical character recognition), "Mouhé" is a dreadful name to search in any language and I think it was quite inconsiderate of such a cameo-prolific shop to use it.

 

Think I have seen this before, although perhaps not the whole long story. Right now I have a live stream of a jewelry auction at Doyle running with audio in another tab, so a bit distracted at the moment. Want to see what happens to a cameo by Luigi Rosi. I considered, but decided against bidding. Since I have 4 of his pieces, outcome for this one still of interest. Breguet later.

 

I've had many occasions on which to observe the creativity of OCR when dealing with print that has breaks in the characters or uses the old style lower case 's'.

 

Mouhé shared premises at 58 Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth with, I think, some printing operations, had jewellers on one side of him and a baker on the other:

 

@Jivvy


Why there is confusion over whether it is Lamant or Lamont.

 

Butting in on your conversation even though I probably have the wrong idea about what you're asking...

Two Lamants from your 1855 almanac:




And a Lamont from "the early years of the 19th century"):
(from Antique Jewellery and Trinkets by Fred. W. Burgess, 1919)

 

lordy. They are so friggin close in every way (except the obvious). I understand the confusion.

The more the merrier! @Bronwen may have had it sorted, but I needed the info to be highlighted, so thank you!

*shakes head*

Looking at the sigs, I'd swear it's one guy who was whimsical about how he spelled his name.

 

On, no, join on in. I thought all this had to be getting pretty tedious for the wider community, so Jivvy & I have been continuing to bat it around by PM. I remarked in one message, referring to the very entry you have spotted, that I now understood why there has been confusion over whether it was Lamant or Lamont: there were 2, both with first initial J. Jivvy replied that she didn't know right off what I was talking about, but had worked it out. I still haven't been able to figure out how to get photos into my messages, wanted her to see what the cameo world has been seeing all these years, so uploaded here & tagged her.

I get the feeling they were competitive brothers. First is the cameo that goes with the Lamont signature, second is Lamant:



Now that she's on the trail with me, Jivvy & I keep finding Schmolls & J just turned up another Mouhe.

I don't understand what time period Mr. Burgess, writing in 1919, is talking about. The 'early years of the 19th century' were before Victoria was even born & helmet shell does not seem to have been widely used until a bit further on. I can understand, from the way the signatures look, why he would think the name was Lamont, but why does he think this Lamont was working in the early 19th? An example I have of one with a date says 184_:


Sleepy, have to get to bed. Meeting someone in the morning at the planetarium.

 

Could there actually be three carvers in play? Two Lamants, as shown in your almanac, working in the mid-19th century, and one Lamont, mentioned by Burgess, working in the early 19th century...

I think the three signatures you show are by the same person, just getting a bit sloppy/hurried with the a/o. The formation of all the other letters is just too similar.

EDIT: Hmmm, in looking at the two Lamant almanac entries, it appears the first one listed does have the first name Julien. Julien is in parentheses and other entries in the almanac show what appear to be first names or initials/abbreviations of first names in parentheses.
The second Lamant entry has a hyphen: Lamant - Julliot, no parentheses. Perhaps Julliot was Lamant's partner, not his first name? And perhaps it's the same Lamant and he works/deals in two different locations?
Two other entries have hyphens, not parentheses: Burger-Leveque and Riboulet-Goby... definitely pairs of surnames.

 

So Burgess states that "there was a serious attempt to revive the art as an industry" in the first half of the 19th century. Then he adds a more contemporary anecdote that the late Queen Victoria was very fond of cameos and further encouraged their wear. Then he switches back to referring to the early 19th c. when he talks about Lamont.
Clear as mud, right?

 

Or maybe there were 4?



Or 5? I also have a single photo example of a hardstone cameo - portrait of Prince Albert, I think - that has the name engraved on the front, on the truncation line, where the neck cuts off. Unfortunately, the photos were not of high enough quality to isolate the signature from them.

 

Excellent observations all. I'll add these two: the printer was not consistent in formatting entries; hyphenated surnames were not that uncommon in France, even before people began to do it as a side effect of women's lib. Riboulet-Goby has 2 locations, suggesting a firm rather than an individual. Is putting a space either side of the hyphen in Lamant - Julliot but not in Burger-Leveque significant? Or just typographical variation? Lamant does camees (italicized) while Lamant - Julliot's listing says sur camees (not italicized).

Running through my 8 photos of signatures on the backs of shell cameos, only the one I showed you really looks like Lamont, yet you'll see at least as many cameos described as saying Lamont, perhaps because English speakers are more familiar with Lamont as a surname. I conclude there was no Lamont, only Lamant, and only one of him, unless the one who did the hardstone piece is another one. The shell Lamants I have seen don't seem like the work done by the same hand as the gent above.

Based on the extract of his work provided by bluumz, I wouldn't trust this Burgess to get anything right. There was no need to revive gem engraving in the early 19th. There are many Georgian hardstone intaglios & intaglios. What did happen is that demand increased. Formerly of interest mainly to male collectors of hardstone intaglios & cameos, Catherine the Great being a notable exception, who vied to find genuinely 'antique' ones (we would call them antiquities), the Holy Grail being antique pieces that were signed, they became a fashion item for women, as Burgess correctly notes, popularized by Queen Victoria, the new must-have for any woman who could afford one. The ladies of Napoleon's court had already gone mad for cameos and seemed to find large ones cut in shell with clearly visible scenes just as appealing as connoisseurs found small stone intaglios you had to squint at to see.

Shell, plentiful, inexpensive, easier to cut, allowed for a growth in the number of artisans who could make cameos & to produce them more rapidly. Helmet shell made a great simulant for sardonyx. Demand grew ever greater as more & more people aspired to make that big tour of Europe (Grand Tour properly applies to something else) and more & more had the means to realize their aspiration. The art didn't need to be revived, it needed to gear up.

https://archive.org/details/antiquejewellery00burgrich/page/n8

For Burgess on cameos:

https://archive.org/details/antiquejewellery00burgrich/page/n241

No time to read, have to get ready for planetarium. The presence of Gayrard on the list reminded me I have a cameo made after his medal of Galileo, so will have to pin that on somewhere.

 

Okay, I really think there are only two Lamonts -- the first several sigs are all the same guy, I'd swear it. In fact, I'm fairly certain I'll require video of two different artists signing like that to believe there is more than one.

Now the "Lamont" (on shell) of @Bronwen post "Maybe four?" (post #158)... that, I think is a SECOND Lamont.

Yes, I realize I have very strong opinions on things unlikely to be proven.

In other news, I've been struggling with the following... I picked it as a puzzle because "the writing is so CLEAR, surely it will be easy"... but I have gotten nowhere with it. I cannot even make a viable name out of it.