Featured CAMEOS: Show & Tell or Ask & Answer

Wowza! Now, if a day comes when you want to sell it, it will have Civil War interest as well as Saulini & cameo portrait interest. Also, you can say the design has been published, always adds desirability for some.

That's quite a flourish Terry used to start the 'T' in his name. You can see how compiler thought it was an oversized 'P'.

 

Think I was aware of this when it came out, but only saw the review by the Met's James David Draper, who was not a fan of the Saulinis, so gave it tepid notice.

OK @mirana & @PepperAnna you've got the book. Does anyone spot my guy with the squiffy hair? He looks a bit young to have done anything notable.

 

Ooh, luscious. A worthy budget bender. I have seen this composition, using the same stone colors, before. I imagine you have too. It must have been a model copied repeatedly. There's a little bell going off in my head telling me the original may be by Charles Brown & live in the Hermitage?

All the notations on the back confirm me in my belief that hardstone pieces with numbers & initials scratched out, with one full signature present, come out of German workshops.

For some reason (a conspiracy of the Italians & French!) no one ever thinks of Germany when they think of cameos, even though the Idar-Oberstein region has been producing them for centuries. Whenever museums are uncertain of the origins of a piece they nearly always attribute it to France or Italy.

You will have to give us a whole travelogue of your visit to Idar, with whatever pix they will allow you to take. Would be interested to know to what extent they are still producing cameos. My impression is that they have turned more to sculptural works, art lapidary.

 

There is one I swear looks right in the face but the hair is not exact. There are hundreds of sketches so I wanted to go through it a couple more times before giving you options to look at. I do think they took liberty with making the hair more artistic so it may not be the thing to get hung up on.

 

Last night my relative said the same: "He may be worth more than you thought with that Civil War connection!" I immediately told my husband to make sure he takes it to an auction house if I have an untimely demise. I need to find expensive items I want to SELL, not KEEP. I'm doing this wrong!;

Victorians seem to just make up cursive letter shapes. The more loops the better.

 

I have 2 Saulini portrait cameos. The first has the name of the sitter, Gould Weston, inscribed on the back. I have provided some info about him in a previous post. The second sitter unfortunately is unknown and neither are in the Saulini book.

 

Absolutely! I am going to Europe for 2 months starting in May; one of my stops will be Idar. Another will be the Kuntzmuseum in Vienna, which is supposed to have a lovely collection of cameos. I'll post lots of pics.

 

There was a Saulini cameo of a Civil War military person that sold a while back for $7-8,000. I think the name was Randall. I'll see if I can find it again.

 

Ding, ding, ding! You are correct. I posted a pic of the Brown intaglio back in December. Since then I have seen a few others mostly in shell.

 

Most do lapidary work, but several still produce modern cameos. I haven't seen any neoclassical cameos. There is a museum there as well as workshops. I am going to spend a few days as check out the area.

I am also going to the Bertel Thorvaldsen museum in Copenhagen. I am really looking forward to that. I love his work.

 

I suspect you are never going to want to leave.

 

You are probably right!

 

Hundreds of sketches can make a gal go cross-eyed but Mr. Renburg (or is it "Newberg/Newbery"?) on pg 156 looks awfully dead-on for your lad.



This also may just be wishful thinking, but your lady cameo in the same post looked a lot like Mrs. Low of pg 132 to me. I was flipping pages without paying attention and she jumped out at me. I think the hair could be fanciful? It may not be a Saulini at all, but wow what a resemblance...

I found it. 8.7k 2008 during the Great Recession, of a confederate colonel who died in the war, and also a former TN mayor, sold in TN. IDK how that compares to a famous Union general with a long career, but if I sold it apparently CT should be the venue. Thanks for the tip! Now to worry about insurance... I've never had to individually insure anything before, let alone appraise so uh...who even does that for cameos, when GIA isn't the best? Will I just be presenting all evidence and letting them fill in a form??

 

Two options for you, but the first one is my winner. He just jumped at me immediately. The hair isn't exact, but the features and even the ear are damn near spot on. The way they loosely sketched the hair, and the way they artistically carved it to be aesthetic makes me think the hair is not the best thing to hang an ID on and one should go for features.



Mr. Etwal, in the Castro Collection.



"Mr. Morrel" but I think you can see the signature is not exactly a match for that interpretation... In the Luigi Saulini Collection.

 

Thank you so much. I know how mind boggling it can be to trawl through a bunch of pictures, looking for a match, especially when there's no guarantee a match is there.

This is Mr. Etwal; think Mr. Morrel is definitely out of the picture. What do we think?

 

The name for 'Mr. Morrel' does not look anything like 'Morrel' in manuscript, more like something that ends in 'ton'.

 

it is indeed close......given artist interpretation

 

I bought a big book on Idar-Oberstein because the table of contents showed a chapter on cameos. Turned out to be only about 6 pages, with a sprinkling of photos, and no real info on how they were manufactured & by whom. Most of the volume was about lapidary as fine art.

 

Hi guys! I got this cameo bracelet in a lot and I really didn’t pay much attention to it to be honest. I pulled it out today to photograph to sell but quickly realized I had something unsellable, or so I think. I believe that the faces themselves are probably ivory, and the backdrop to the cameos are Tortoiseshell. Can anybody give me your thoughts? I’ll see if I can’t post several pictures here. It is 800 silver.

 

from you photo's...I concur..