SECOND HALF 19TH CENTURY, PROBABLY VIENNA

Daylesford House, acquired by the 2nd Viscount Rothermere (1898-1978) in 1946, underwent major restoration in the early 1960s with the advice of John Fowler. Lord Rothermere wanted to restore the house to its former glory, when Warren Hastings (1732-1818), former Govenor-General of Bengal, India, was responsible for Daylesford's late 18th-century transformation. Lord Rothermere had both the means and the enthusiasm to acquire paintings and works of art connected with Hastings and India, and from Hastings' own collection. This elaborate group, was purchased by Lord Rothermere on the basis of its reputed provenance - that it had been a gift from Warren Hastings to his wife, although the date of the object itself precludes this. The group stood in the Drawing Room window bay at Daylesford until the house was sold to Baron Heinrich Thyssen in the early 1970s.

During the Baroque period the expansion of trading routes to the Orient stimulated a new interest in exotic materials, chief among them ivory, which, better than any other material captured the allure and mysticism of distant lands. By the late 16th century there was established in Vienna a rich school of sculptors producing exquisitely carved ivory objects for the Kunstkammer collections of the Holy Roman Emperors. With all the mannerist brilliance of the age, these masters hewed the precious ivory into all variety of compositions. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, see an ivory group of Apollo and Daphne by Jakob Auer (d. 1706), which is worthy of Bernini, a statue of Emperor Leopold I on rearing horseback toppling an Ottoman warrior, and King David by Leonhard Kern (d. 1662), dressed in the armour of an ancient Roman general.

The present composition of an elephant howdah is no less ambitious but dates to two hundred years later, when the fashion for historicist ornament stimulated in Vienna a new generation of master craftsman to make curios inspired by baroque and renaissance works in precious materials such as ivory and rock crystal. Favoured by a burgeoning class of wealthy international collectors, bejewelled ivory figures were popular and although single such figures of harlequins and renaissance queens were the mainstay of production, this elephant howdah is exceptional in both its scale and the delicacy of its carving. Indicating that it was very probably a special commission, its sheer size necessitates that a huge quantity of costly ivory was devoted to its realisation. The orientalist theme – the howdah – as used to bear Maharajas through battles, hunts, and ceremonial processions, and the distinctly European looking noble lady with African and Ottoman attendants, underscores the self-assurance of the Colonialist age.