Featured Gatierre, Danbiere & Other Mysteries

And not so very antique. It is good to be warned, there are so many pitfalls when it comes to antique jewellery.

 

Your all collections are so nice. Really these are nice antique jewelry. I love these.

 

What we're learning here is that none of these pieces are antique, regardless of any dates written on them.

 

Yes. So many fakes and repros out there. So I welcome any insight. My best defense against fraud is education.

 

Knowledge both helps protect you from wasting money on things that will not live up to their billing & sometimes enables you to recognize a treasure that has been hiding in plain sight. I'm trying to inoculate members now with the hope that in time the information will spread & be perpetuated so something like herd immunity develops when it comes to these products, the uncritical assumptions, outrageous claims & even more outrageous asking prices.

 

I wrote it. I'm known on CW as cameosleuth. I used to post there quite a bit more, then I found this joint. Now I check in to see if anyone could use my help with a cameo & found the thread about the frog when I was looking exactly for that.

 

T.P. Danbiere Paris trinket or ring boxes marked on bottom.

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These are made of a translucent resin that hopeful sellers describe variously as carved amber, tortoiseshell or bois durci. Colors differ a bit, but all are some shade of brown. Another development is the application of metallic coatings to mimic silver or pewter. Interior compartment is so small, they are suited only to rings, pins, etc. Any trinket would need to be very small.




The box with the La'Gatierre lady on the lid is a rarity. I do not have a photo of any other. I do have this, which harks back to the opaque orange of the La'Gatierre pieces:



Perhaps the most common one is Nouveau Lady.



This particular box had an unusual feature. Others are inscribed on the bottom; this one has a little plaque.



Also rare is the attempt to produce the lady with bird box to look like jade or malachite or, as one currently for sale has it, serpentine. It was less successful than other simulants.



Even rarer is this little stoppered bottle. I have never seen another.



Also rare and seems like quite a departure:



So here we have one family.

 

Addendum to the above (my picture allowance was spent). These 'Danbiere' boxes feel very sturdy and the walls are quite thick. However, I learned the hard way, with a little help from a feline friend, that if they fall, they do sort of bounce, but you may also be left with something like this:



Curiously, although the damage looks like rounded bites taken out of the edge, they did not come out as single pieces. 'Shards' is the best word, many sharp little splinters that weren't round at all. The edges of the 'bites' are quite smooth. Anyone with the knowledge of polymer chemistry to tell us what it says about the molecular structure of this material that it fractures in this manner?

 

Make that gaterie.

 

It gets difficult now to make order of what happened in the step from the inscription T.P. Danbiere Paris on the bottom of a little box:

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to being T.P. Danbiere (more legibly written) Paris 1889, on this faux marble plaque and others like it:

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Once again, a highly attractive image. I have not been able to find the original artwork behind this dancing lady and her young companion. Because she carries a kithara and also a plectrum, I think of her as the Muse of Dance, Terpsichore. Her putto friend keeps time by jangling a sistrum.

This is the telltale evidence for the connection between marble-look plaque, the small lidded boxes and the cameos. What links this plaque to others is not what is on the front; it is something on the back.

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The date 1889 appears again here because this is a replica of an award medal Louis Bottée engraved for the Exposition Universelle of that year. Optimistic private sellers and negligent auction houses are easily led by the combination of inscription and medal into thinking the plaque was exhibited at, or made for, the Exposition of 1889. In this case the medal and inscription support each other.

However, the Bottée Exposition Universelle medal is not the only one to be seen on this particular plaque. As an alternative to this,

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you might see this

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which is the reverse of a medal celebrating the visit of Peter the Great to the Paris Mint in 1717, an event completely unrelated to the Exposition of 1889.

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The Latin motto VIRES ACQUIRIT EUNDO is not specific to Peter the Great. In this case perhaps it suggests that the more he travels around, the greater he becomes.

I have seen the Mint Visit medal on the back of a faux marble plaque taken from an ivory relief by the Flemish master François Duquesnoy. The copy of a different Duquesnoy has this medal, Perfugium Regibus:

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a medal made by Jean Mauger to recognize France for giving shelter to James II of Britain and his family in 1689. A pretty medal; another entirely unrelated event.

There are two other insets seen on these pieces. One is the one taken up in the Numismatic Fraud thread, which has an ornate letter F, the words 'St. Petersburg' and the year 1882. (Also a cross shape on the left?) Speculation has got going that this may relate to Fabergé, something for which we were able to find no evidence. I have seen it accepted without question as meaning the item was made in Russia and is antique. These must also be rejected.

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The final medallion is one photo too many, so, see next.

 

The final medallion is one that looks like an impression taken from an engraved gem: Cupid seated, holding his bow behind him with one hand, holding out a wreath of roses with the other.

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The inset above has the appearance of black stone with a couple of significant chips. This bronze-look one looks as though the chip in the thigh was patched:

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When I get my wind back, I'll show some of the other plaques and, where I can, the artwork they are taken from.

 

Just thought I had discovered that 'Danbiere' was a real word; then worked it out that what was meant was 'daubière', sort of a big double boiler.

 

Before I launch into the most commonly seen plaques, it is worth watching this if you haven't already done so.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/season/3/louisville-ky/appraisals/fake-ew-wyon-plaques--199803A04/

 

Cousin Bou has found another cameo amongst her own treasures.

Miss Bronwen Cuz! Don't wanna make you jelly BUT I have one of those fakies!





Compare to the photos with post 16 of this thread. The deep curvature suggests the impression for the mold for this Madonna was taken from an actual shell cameo.



But the flat back and thick edges give the game away.

Thank you Cuz @BoudiccaJones for adding to our knowledge on this subject.

 

Thank YOU my Cuz for telling me what she was! <3

 

She could use a clean around the bezel edge. Now that you've shown me this one, no doubt I'll see her all over the place. Surprised I haven't noticed her before. Wonder if this model was somehow more prone to fracturing, perhaps because of the fluctuating thickness of the background layer.

 

Cuz do you think the crack then was on the original cameo? As the other one I saw on eBay had the exact same crack? x

 

I don't think they would have used a shell cameo with a major crack to model for the resin copies, but when they crack, they seem to fracture in similar ways. Is it still possible to find the one you saw on eBay?