Elephant

A wrong elephant

It is every art collector's nightmare: an object in the collection turns out not to be real but fake. It can easily happen to novice collectors, but also experienced collectors and museum curators see this nightmare come true sometimes.

Sometimes the forgery is discovered shortly after purchase. In that case, apart from the disappointment, there is usually not much wrong and the seller can be contacted for redress. It is different when an item has been in the collection for many years and new insights show there is something wrong. Private collectors then have no other option than to accept the loss. They prefer to get rid of the ‘contaminated’ item as soon as possible. In a museum, such an item remains in the collection, but it usually disappears to an insignificant place in the depot.

An example of this in the Princessehof collection is this statue of a standing white elephant with multi-coloured accents. About forty years ago it was acquired for the museum from a gallery in Delft, as a Delft sculpture from the early eighteenth century. The purchase price was stated on the inventory card of the object. A considerable sum, but for such an exceptional statue that was certainly not strange. Cows, goats and horses in white Delftware were known, but an elephant was rare and therefore more than worth the high asking price. The letters JvdH are on the belly at the bottom of the animal. The curator at the time saw the signature of Jan van der Houck in it, who in 1701 was a master painter at the De Porceleyne Fles pottery bakery in Delft.

Elephant, 1900 – 1925, Faeencerie Géo Martel, Desvres, France, earthenware, h. 19,4 cm, on loan from Ottema-Kingma Stichting.

By coincidence, Museum Prinsenhof in Delft turned out to have a similar elephant, bought at an auction. This one only had the letter H on its belly. In 1976, both statues stood next to each other in the Princessehof, at a theme exhibition about elephants. In the brochure that came with it, it is assumed that the same printing molds were possibly used for the example in the Prinsenhof, but that it was made in a different, non-Delft factory.

So far so good, but in the late eighties doubts arose about the authenticity of the elephant in the Princessehof. The curator who was responsible for the collection of Delft pieces at the time crossed out the dating 1701-1743 (the period that Van der Houck worked at De Porceleyne Fles) on the inventory card. At ‘production location Delft’ he wrote: ‘false??’, and under the high amount of the insurance value he placed the remark: ‘if it is real’. Concrete arguments for these changes are not given on the card. It is probable there was only a vague feeling about the correctness of the origin and dating of the piece. People simply did not trust it.

In 2003, this ‘Delft’ elephant was one of the discussion pieces at a symposium on forgeries in ceramics and glass, which took place in the Princessehof. In the meantime, more knowledge had become available about the various production centres that, from the 1870s onwards, focused on imitations of the famous Delftware from the two centuries before. Particularly in Desvres in northern France, several companies were active that manufactured earthenware in the old Delft style. They mastered the technique thoroughly. The products they brought onto the market are only with difficulty distinguishable from genuine Delftware. Initially, these factories put their own brand name on the pieces, but after a while they dropped it and eventually painted old Delftware marks on them. In doing so, they left the trail of copies or imitations and consciously took the path of forgeries.

They marketed these pieces as originals with the intention of ‘deceiving an avid collector into buying something for a lot of money that looked a hundred or two hundred years older than it actually was’, as Jan-Daniël van Dam, former curator of the Princessehof, so aptly described it in the publication accompanying the same symposium. In his article, he illustrated two pages from a product catalogue from around 1925 by the Faiencerie Géo Martel in Desvres. And there, next to all sorts of other plastics, is undeniably our elephant! Gone is the vague feeling. From now on, the elephant in the Princessehof, together with the one in the Prinsenhof, will be listed as ‘plastics from Desvres, made in the first quarter of the twentieth century’. Forgeries: they often mean one illusion poorer, but one experience richer!

Supply and demand

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was hardly any interest in the once so glorious decorative pottery from Delft, but from 1860 onwards the appreciation increased strongly. Collectors were looking for beautiful pieces for their collection. And where there is demand, there is supply. Especially in France, pottery manufacturers saw how lucrative the trade in ‘Delft’ was, and they decided to copy it. In addition to the companies in Desvres, the Samson company in Paris supplied many Delft imitations, complete with the old factory marks. Often there was a cross or the letter s (for Samson) next to such a mark, but these were later deliberately scratched away by traders so that the piece could pass for an original Delft example. Many clever forgeries have been made, but sometimes they fall through, for example because the shard, that is to say the colour of the baked clay, is more orange or red than the typical yellow of real Delft. The painted decorations are also sometimes stiffer in design than the original. Or they do not match the brand on them in terms of style and date. In the meantime, these factories have long since ceased to exist and their imitation products have in turn become collectors' items!

Karin Gaillard, curator European ceramics at Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics.