April 26, the auctioneer Woolley and Wallis in Salisbury, United Kingdom, sold a pair of natural pearl and diamond earrings for £ 1.4 million

Let's look at this jewel and its history.

 

Expertise

 

The pair of earrings consigned by a private seller, unnamed, was sent for expertise to the Schweizerische Stiftung für Edelstein-Forschung, Swiss Gemological Institute.

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Mochica culture has developed on the north coast of Peru between the first century and the ninth century AD. It is famous for its ceramics deposited in graves as offerings to the dead.

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Neoclassical sculptor of recognized talent in the late eighteenth century, the name of Louis-Simon Boizot is now unknown to the general public. His name appears frequently in the catalogs of auctions leaning against that of Sevres or that of a bronze sculptor.

Rediscovering this talented artist who gave birth to many groups bisque as well as first-rate clocks and bronzes for royal furniture.

 

His beginning

 

Louis-Simon Boizot was born in Paris in 1743, his father Antoine Boizot is designer at the factory of Gobelins tapestries. At the age of 16 he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and cut his teeth in the studio of the sculptor René-Michel Slodtz (1705-1764) following Antoine Houdon (1741 - 1828). In 1762 he won the Prix de Rome for sculpture and stayed in Rome from 1765 to 1770 where he rediscovered the ancient statuary then sought amateurs and executes commands for Catherine II of Russia and for many sights of Paris, the Palais Bourbon , and the churches of Sainte Genevieve and Saint Sulpice. From 1773 and until 1800 he exhibited at the Salon and in 1778 he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture with a marble representing Meleagre now in the Louvre Museum.

 

Boizot and Sevres

 

In 1773, he succeeded to the sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet at the head of sculpture workshops of the Manufacture de Sèvres where he created many models of groups that are executed in biscuit. His style is marked by the neoclassicism but retains a touch of fantasy dear to Louis XV. This is particularly noticeable in its various sculptures on the theme of Venus. A vase of Sevres porcelain amphora-shaped is called "vase Boizot" but the role that our sculptor played in its creation remains unclear. He retains his position until 1800.

 

La toilette de Vénus d'après Louis-Simon Boizot, biscuit en porcelaine de Sèvres, vente Tajan le 15 décembre 2011.

 

Boizot and the bronze makers

 

The talent of sculptor Boizot allows him to work with the largest bronze makers of the late Louis XVI in particular Gouthière, Thomire and Remond.

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Increasingly rare, the restoration of gilded wood requires great patience and respect for traditional techniques. Authenticite offers you to rediscover these techniques where the use of the aerosol is strictly banned!

 

The work of gold is a noble art in which two businesses are involved: the beater of gold and the artisan gilder. The work of the beater of gold is to create different alloys, to reproduce the variety of colors of gold. It makes bullion that passes through a rolling mill where the gold leaf will emerge. There are only fifty gold-beaters in the world including one in France!

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Following the Manet retrospective in 2010 and Monet in 2011, the Musée d'Orsay associated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston presents Edgar Degas (1834-1917). The bias of this exhibition is not to make us rediscover the works of Degas, whose last retrospective was in 1988, but to present a new angle, his female nudes.

 

Born into a wealthy family, brilliant student, Baccalaureate in hand, Degas turns to an artistic career. It was not until 1855, he was admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he learned his art by copying the paintings of great masters and the art of the nude was then regarded as one of most difficult.

 

Painter and sculptor of genius, especially famous for his dancers, his horse racing, his genre scenes and portraits, it appears that the nude occupied an essential place throughout his artistic career. For 50 years he dedicated to transforming the art of the nude, then academic subject.

 

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Ergonomic, economic, aesthetic, practical ... These are the qualities that can be attributed to the chair named RAR (Rocking Arm Chair Rod Base) by Charles and Ray Eames. Emblematic of Design, it crossed the decades without a wrinkle and always wins a huge market success.

 

Ray and Charles Eames are the creators. Presented for the first time under the Low Cost Furniture Design Competition organized by the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art in New York), the RAR contributed to the success of this pair of American designers who exerted a major influence in the production of twentieth century.

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Buy at auction, for the newcomer this may seem complicated and reserved for the initiated.

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The art history was written without José Maria Sert (1874-1945), quickly forgotten after his death in 1945. Support of the artist to the nationalists and Franco after the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) has certainly contributed to the ouster as his artistic choices.

 

José Maria Sert is indeed the heir of classical painting and how to paint from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, far from the avant-garde: when, in the Salon d'Automne of 1907, he exhibited his sketches for the decorative program of the cathedral of Vic (Catalonia), Picasso has just completed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Matisse to shock the critics at the Salon des Independants with his Nu Bleu. But this is not the ambition of Sert.

 

It does not seek to revolutionize the paint, but is part of a "return to order" aesthetic and dream of large frescoes dressing churches of Assisi, Rimini, Florence or Pisa. For him, the mural is well above the easel painting.

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May 15, 2012, the auction house Sotheby's will sell at auction in Geneva, a diamond royal, the Beau Sancy, and witnessed four centuries of European history. This exceptional gem weighing 34.98 carats is cut in modified pear double rose is estimated between $2 and $4 million. A particularly low estimate let us remember that in December 2008, Christie's sold the Wittelsbach Blue Diamond 16.7 million euros.

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Rendezvous of lovers and collectors of beautiful drawings, the 21st edition of the Salon du dessin will be held in the Bourse de Paris from March 28 to April 2. Take a sneak preview, our selection of five exceptional drawings old masters, modern and contemporary.

 

1 – Boilly

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