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This circular earthenware plate is painted with a landscape scene showing a man on horseback in the center flanked by a group of about a dozen men to the left and ten boys and men to the right. The white horse faces our right as it rears up on its back legs and looks down at a dark chasm in the earth beneath its front legs. The man astride the horse has pale skin and light brown hair, and he holds a sword as he looks back to the crowd to our left. Everyone in the crowd also has pale skin. Most of the people wear vibrant, royal and sky blue and pumpkin orange, with a few touches of butter yellow, turquoise, and purple. Both groups are situated in front of sandstone-colored columns and pediments, which flank the scene. A cluster of buildings rises along a ridge in the middle distance to the left of center, and more structures are built along a riverbank to our right. The river weaves away from us to blue mountains in the deep distance.

Painter of the Milan Marsyas

Charger with Marcus Curtius plunging into the chasm, c. 1525/1530

West Building, Ground Floor - Gallery 19

Medium

tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica)

Dimensions

overall (height by diameter): 3.7 × 47.4 cm (1 7/16 × 18 11/16 in.)

Credit Line

Corcoran Collection (William A. Clark Collection)

Accession Number

2014.136.324

Artists / Makers

Painter of the Milan Marsyas (ceramist) Italian, active 1500/1550

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
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Inscription

reverse near rim, scratched into glaze, Fountaine inventory number: 20

Provenance

Fountaine collection, Narford Hall, near King's Lynn, Norfolk; by descent in the Fountaine family; (Fountaine sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London,16-19 June 1884, 2nd day, no. 207);[1] Oskar Hainauer [1840-1894], Berlin;[2] by inheritance to his widow, Julie Hainauer [1850-1926], Berlin; purchased 1906 with the entire Hainauer collection by (Duveen Brothers, Inc., London, New York, and Paris); sold 17 October 1906 to William Andrews Clark [1839-1925], New York;[3] bequest 1926 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.

[1] For a detailed study of the Fountaine collection of maiolica see Andrew Moore, "The Fountaine Collection of Maiolica," The Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1023 (June 1988): 435-447. Sir Andrew Fountaine (1676-1753) was the originator of the collection. As Moore writes, no record of individual items in the collection dating from Fountaine's time is known, but eighteenth century texts and Narford Hall inventories describing the collection in general terms do exist, and it is likely that Fountaine acquired much of the collection during his second Grand Tour that began in 1714. Sir Andrew's heirs added items to the collection, and it appears that it was the Andrew Fountaine who lived 1808-1873 (Moore describes him as Andrew IV) who added most substantially to the core of his ancestor's original collection.

At the time of Andrew IV's 1835 inheritance from his father (also Andrew Fountaine, 1770-1835), he prepared an inventory of the maiolica that Moore publishes in the first appendix of his article. Between 1855 and his death in 1873, Andrew IV compiled a second inventory, which is contained in the "Family Book," held at Narford Hall at the time of Moore's article. The numbering of this inventory corresponds to numbers which, together with the monogram AF, were incised at some time in the nineteenth century on items in the collection. Moore's article includes a concordance of the numbered items in the second inventory with the numbered lots in the 1884 sale, and the NGA charger, which has only the number 20 inscribed on its reverse, is identified as number 20 in part III of the second inventory (this part, of six, is described as "Large Majolica dishes exceeding 15 1/2 inches in diameter [Total: 39]").

The second inventory also includes the initials "AF" in the margin next to 99 of the total of 276 maiolica entries. Moore concludes that "these initials are almost certainly [Andrew IV's] record of his own purchases" and that "by inference, the remaining items [with three exceptions]...stand the greatest chance of having been acquired by Sir Andrew Fountaine, the collection's originator, in the eighteenth century. Since the entry for the NGA charger has an "AF" next to it in the margin, it is probably one of the items acquired by Andrew IV.

[2] See the annotated sale catalogue and pp. 63-70 of "The Fountaine Collection: Prices and Purchasers' Names," both in the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische en Ikonografische Documentatie, The Hague, available at Brill Online, accessed 23 April 2020, copy in NGA curatorial files. Most buyer names were published in [Report on the second day of the Fountaine sale], The Times (18 June 1884), which is included in the list of prices and names.

[3] Duveen Brothers Records, accession number 960015, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: Series I.D, General business records, 1907-1964, reel 59, box 163, Hainauer collection sales ledger, July 1906-December 1909; copy in NGA curatorial files.

Associated Names

Clark, William Andrews
Corcoran Gallery of Art
Duveen Brothers, Inc.
Fountaine, Andrew Sir
Hainauer, Julie
Hainauer, Oskar

Exhibition History

1986: Italian Renaissance Maiolica from the William A. Clark Collection, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley; The Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston; The Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Saint Louis Art Museum; Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Toronto; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dayton Art Institute; University Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 1986-1989, no. 47, repro.

2007: Masterpieces: European Art from the Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 7 February - 12 August 2007, no catalogue.

2007: Treasures of European Decorative Art and Sculpture, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, 25 August 2007 - 29 March 2009, no catalogue.

2018: Sharing Images: Renaissance Prints into Maiolica and Bronze, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2018, no. 27

Bibliography

1897: Bode, Wilhelm von, ed. Die Sammlung Oscar Hainauer / The Collection of Oscar Hainauer. [bound as one volume, English and German pages interleaved in one page sequence] Berlin, 1897 and London, 1906: 38, 115, no. 336 (M56).

1925: Carroll, Dana H. Catalogue of Objects of Fine Art and Other Properties at the Home of William Andrews Clark, 962 Fifth Avenue. Part II. Unpublished manuscript, n.d. (1925): 261, no. 56.

1955: Breckenridge, James D. "Italian Maiolica in the W.A. Clark Collection." The Corcoran Gallery of Art Bulletin 7, no. 3 (April 1955): no. 76.

1955: Von Erdberg, Joan Prentice. "Italian Maiolica at the Corcoran Gallery of Art." The Burlington Magazine 97, no. 624 (March 1955): 73, 75 fig. 13.

1987: Chastel, André, and Wendy Watsonl. "Made in Renaissance." FMR (July/August 1987): 111, repro.

1988: Andrew Moore, "The Fountaine Collection of Maiolica," The Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1023 (June 1988): 445.