A magnificent and important gold and silver damascened forged iron vase, signed by Plácido Zuloaga, Guipúzcoa/Eibar, Spain, dated 1881

of baluster form with applied dragon-form handles, faceted flaring neck with octagonal mouth and galleried rim, the ovoid body tapering to a narrow foot resting in a cup base with open horseshoe arches and a stepped spreading foot with flat base, decorated allover with gold and silver damascening with a central lobed cartouche enclosing geometric arabesques above a belt of cursive calligraphy repeating the phrase al-yaman wa al-iqabal ('Fortune and Prosperity') and foliate panels below, the upper body with swirling arabesques of leaves, palmettes and flowers, the handles with arabesque roundels and extravagent scrolled leaf and dragon head terminals with a pine cone motif on the body below, the neck with palmettes and arabesques, the cup base decorated ensuite to the body, one handle inscribed to the inner face PLACIDO/ZULOAGA, the other GUIPUZCOA/EIBAR 1881

The artistic bravura and technical virtuosity manifested in this work is truly breath-taking. The profusion of gold and silver inlay is a tour de force of the damascener’s art and a magnificent homage to the Islamic model on which it is based.

the ceramic prototype

The so-called Alhambra vase is considered the most important of the purely decorative Nazarí ceramic types.  Their amphora shape undoubtedly derives from traditional plain Arab storage jars that could only be laid on their side or placed vertically in a receptacle or hollow in the ground made to accommodate them. Since they had to be carried and placed, their size was limited. The large ornamental vases, varying in height from 1.20 to 1.70 meters, could then have had no other purpose than to please the eye. It is speculated that they were intended to be displayed vertically in niches in a building’s interior walls.

The vase is apparently so named because the earliest written references to the type date from the sixteenth century, recording their presence in the Alhambra. There are successive references from the next two centuries and at the end of the eighteenth the Royal Academy of San Fernando published engravings of two highly decorated examples, neither of which is known today.

During much of the nineteenth century the popular press and art magazines fascinated the public with illustrated accounts of the discovery of a multitude of objects from earlier Spanish civilisations. These were prized collectibles for those who could acquire them. Artists and artisans likewise found inspiration in the exotica coming from the ground.

plácido zuloaga

Plácido Zuloaga was born in Madrid in 1834.  His father Eusebio, also born in Madrid, was of Basque descent. The Zuloagas were an Eibar family, and Eibar in the Basque country had been a gunmaking centre since the fifteenth century. Eusebio, who trained as a gunmaker, while employed as Armourer of the Royal Armoury officially referred to Eibar (Guipúzcoa) as his home (patria). It was there that between 1846 and 1847 Eusebio established his “factory” (fábrica) which would eventually bring Plácido to Eibar for most of his adult life.

Eusebio was undoubtedly his son’s first teacher, but in 1848 he sent the fourteen-year-old boy to Paris to study in the factory of Henri Lepage, “Arquebusier du Roi” [Gunmaker to Louis XVIII]. His stay in France must have been brief for that same year he was caught up in the Revolution of 1848 and fled, mostly on foot, to his father’s house in Madrid. After weeks of travel, upon reaching his destination, he fell exhausted. For the next three days he slept without taking food or water.

In 1850 Plácido accompanied his father to Eibar where Eusebio was to “prepare objects for the London exhibition.” While there, the sixteen-year-old seems to have worked – possibly designing – an armour commissioned of Eusebio by the king consort, D. Francisco de Asís. A series of his sketches and wax models survive to indicate that he assumed Eusebio’s commission, but the armour itself was never completed.

While no record exists, Plácido must also have accompanied his father to the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, but apparently submitted nothing of his own making. In Paris in 1855, again with Eusebio, he was for the first time acknowledged as an artist in his own right. The catalogue praised his trophy of dead birds chiselled in iron and an iron repoussé boar. It also states that he had executed designs for “the majority of the other pieces.” The latter included wax low-relief models illustrating battle scenes and several finished repoussé iron plates, certainly pieces from the king’s armour project.

Also in 1855 Plácido completed royal commissions for a writing stand and an album with iron covers, both heavily chiselled and damascened. The album was intended as a gift from the queen to the consort, and the inner face of the cover is so inscribed in gold damascene.

Little is known of Plácido’s activities between 1855 and 1859 other than his attendance at exhibitions in Paris (1855), Brussels (1856), and Vienna (1857-1858). In 1859 he was definitely in Eibar when he took over the management of his father’s factory.

By this time, Plácido’s artistic path had been prescribed. Only one firearm is known from his hand, a small damascened pinfire revolver probably coinciding with his appointment to the factory; otherwise, everything he produced was an object of art, a piece of his own design ornamented according to his own imagination.

In 1861 Eusebio bought a house in Eibar, an ancient stone tower, the ancestral home of the dukes of Hervias. It would serve as Plácido’s home as well as house, his workshop (taller) and museum. It would also be the school in which he taught damascening to his disciples, becoming the birthplace of Spain’s damascene industry. Here Plácido received the first of his most important commissions, an iron table clock ordered by the queen mother for presentation to Napoleon III. Forced to leave Spain in 1854, María Cristina de Borbón lived in permanent exile in Paris. Eusebio would deliver the clock to her there.

Completed in 1865, the large and extremely heavy iron clock exhibits a profusion of renaissance ornament (Lavin 1997, figs. 11-12). Decorative columns and spires are chiselled in vegetal designs in relief, their ground is entirely covered in gold and silver damascene overlay. A dedicatory inscription in French identifies both María Cristina and Napoleon III. The execution of the ornament looks back to Isabel II’s writing stand of 1859. Plácido would eventually retreat from heavily three-dimensional renaissance imitation and develop a cleaner, smoother surface, its ornament often derived solely from damascene overlay with vegetal or geometric themes.

In Eibar Plácido’s prosperity seemed assured; royal commissions alone would support the factory, and his large staff of workmen and disciples could ensure a rapid turnover. However, in 1868 the queen, Isabel II, was forced into exile. Eusebio’s position in the royal household was terminated, and all possibility of further royal commissions evaporated. Plácido was left heavily in debt because he had paid 30,000 francs for materials for royal commissions, money he would never recover.   

Fearing a bleak future, Plácido held out one hope.  He immediately contacted Alfred Morrison whom he had met in London in 1862 when he had entered a few objects in the South Kensington Exhibition.  Morrison had inherited a fortune and the family estate at Fonthill from his father, the textile magnate James Morrison. It has been suggested that Alfred and Plácido were introduced by the designer and architect Owen Jones who also seems to have influenced Plácido’s ornamental repertoire. In the six years following their meeting and Isabel II’s departure, Plácido executed several commissions for Morrison involving visits to England. By 1868 there existed enough familiarity between the two for Plácido to propose that he work exclusively for Morrison for a yearly stipend of 50,000 francs, 25,000 of which would pay the year’s wages of his fourteen skilled workmen.

Whatever the terms of their agreement, for the next twenty years nearly all of Plácido’s major works were executed for Morrison. However, he does not seem to have entirely restricted his output since other important outside commissions were executed during this period as evidenced by surviving signed and dated objects. Outstanding among these was the sarcophagus of General Juan Prim, head of the liberal government that succeeded the abdication of Isabel II (Lavin1997, fig. 13). Prim was assassinated in Madrid in 1870, and the iron renaissance sarcophagus with its monumental effigy was ordered at the same time as the conflicting Morrison commission discussed below. We cannot know, but Plácido, beholden to Morrison, must have delayed beginning the Prim commission for a year or two.

Plácido’s first commission for Morrison since the abdication was begun in Eibar in 1870.  This was a conscious artistic tour de force, a renaissance-style italianate iron cassone over two meters in length and more than a meter high, now in the Khalili collection (Lavin 1997, cat. no. 1). Its decoration, both inside and out, ran the gamut of Plácido’s decorative vocabulary. There is some – but little – of his relief chiselling, here imitating wood carving; large panels of iron repoussé; borders of delicate smooth-surfaced damascene in gold and silver. Silver and niello panels cover the entire interior. It is almost as if the artist were saying, “this is what I am capable of. May it guide you in future commissions.” A dedicatory plaque on the cassone’s rear elevation contains the Spanish inscription in silver damascene: COMMISSIONED BY/ SEÑOR DON ALFRED/ MORRISON/ AND EXECUTED BY/ PLACIDO ZULOAGA/ IN EIBAR YEAR/ 1870 AND 1871.

The cassone was traditionally known as the Fonthill Casket since it originally was included among the furnishings of that residence. During the 1840s Owen Jones had worked for the elder Morrison on the interior decoration of Fonthill. When in 1865 Alfred acquired a London house at 16 Carlton House Terrace, he put Jones in charge of its decoration. Enamoured of Islamic art, during the 1830s Jones had resided and sketched in the Alhambra in Granada. There he did the groundwork for his study, Plans, Elevations and Details of the Alhambra. However, he is much better known for his Grammar of Ornament published in 1856.

Early interior photographs of the house at Carlton House Terrace reveal the simplicity of Jones’s ornament incorporating both classical and Islamic elements. This simplicity must have come as a revelation to Plácido, who in spite of his perodic attendance at international trade exhibitions, was working out of the mainstream, seemingly more attuned to elaborate isabeline ornament of the early 1500s.

Even though the two artists were employed on the same project, they were not in constant contact. However, Plácido made frequent trips to England where he was a house-guest of the Morrisons. There must have been theories exchanged and sketches made for future projects; Morrison himself was quite an aficionado of contemporary decorative art. It is not surprising that Plácido’s next commission was for a matched pair of large iron Alhambra vases profusely decorated in gold and silver damascene over a completely smooth surface (Lavin 1997, cat. no. 2). Their theme consists mainly of flowers, leaves and intertwining vines is suggestive of “Eastern” design. Decorative panels isolating the elements are outlined in the form of oriental architectural arches.  Alfred Morrison occupied his London home toward the middle of the 1870s. The Fonthill casket was transferred there and the two Alhambra vases were probably delivered there in 1877.

It is almost certain that Plácido derived his vases from early engravings, ostensibly of two genuine pieces recovered from the Alhambra toward the end of the eighteenth century. It is entirely possible that he had never seen one “in the flesh” until a genuine artifact was brought to Eibar, probably during the 1870s. If it was there before Plácido had passed the point of no return in the construction of the Morrison pair, it had no effect on their design.

The reason for the genuine vase’s presence was to fit it with an ingenious revolving base and vertical support which would allow it to stand upright and at the same time be rotated to display all sides. The manufacture of such a device would almost certainly require that the piece be at hand for constant fitting. The work was certainly done in Eibar where it was also damascened in Plácido’s style, possibly by one of his principal disciples, Teodoro Ybarzabal. Certainly Plácido would have been quite familiar with it.  The vase with its customised stand is in a private collection and unpublished.

the present vase

One, and possibly two, more Alhambra vases were produced by Plácido in the Zuloaga shop in 1881. The present vase conforms in its body, neck and lack of foot to the familiar Nasrid vases associated with the Alhambra. Like the original ceramic prototypes, Plácido’s iron vase was constructed in several elements: the bulbous body was made in two cup-shaped halves joined by welding or silver soldering. The neck was likewise attached completely formed, filed and decorated as were the handles and foot. This permitted areas, inaccessible when all parts were assembled, to be decorated. In the construction of the present piece Plácido strove for authenticity in imitating the lack of a foot on which to stand the vase upright.  This required the use of a separate removable foot with baluster turnings, broad and heavy enough to receive the vase’s lower extremity and hold it vertically with no danger of the piece toppling. The auxiliary base’s cup-shaped upper half has been pierced with horseshoe arches consistent with its “Eastern” applied decoration.

Plácido has been more faithful to the genuine object by dividing the neck into eight raised panels separated by deep vertical grooves. At the base of each panel is attached a separate three-dimensional stylized leaf, gilded and silvered.  The panels are absent on the Morrison vases on which they are merely suggested by the damascening.  The lip of the neck is octagonal and from it hangs a narrow band of gothic tracery.

The entire piece is profusely damascened in a combination of yellow and “green” gold and silver executed in both wire and leaf. The designs are almost entirely vegetal – flowers and tendrils – with anthemia in panels and borders. Plácido has shown his knowledge of the late eighteenth-century engraving of a surviving Alhambra vase published by the Real Academia de San Fernando. On the two faces of the bulbous upper half of the vase’s body he has copied the wide arch formed by a decorative band. This frames a scene showing two gazelles and profuse floral ornament. The engraving can be identified as a vase still in Granada in the Museo Nacional de Arte Hispano Musulmán. On his vase, Plácido has omitted the gazelles and filled the space with a lozenge-shaped panel taken from the lower half of the Granada vase. Encircling the vase’s midsection is a decorative band containing the repeated inscription 'Fortune and Prosperity'.

The most startling features of the present vase are the handles forged in the form of a grotesque dragon’s head. The same handles are found on a vase of similar size still in possession of the Zuloaga family in Zumaya. The Zumaya vase, however, is decorated in enamel rather than damascene.

Because of its magnificence, it is very tempting to identify the present vase with the one Gregorio de Mújica mentions as a gift from Alfonso XII for the king of Portugal. Unfortunately, at present there is no firm evidence to substantiate this.

We are grateful to Dr James Lavin for his invaluable assistance in compiling this catalogue entry.

literature

Ramiro Larrañaga and others, Los Zuloaga, dinastía de artistas vascos, San Sebastián, 1988, pp. 91-92.
James D. Lavin, ‘The Zuloaga Armourers,’ Journal of the Arms and Armour Society, Leatherhead, 1986, pp. 63-148.
James D. Lavin, The Art and Tradition of the Zuloagas, Spanish Damascene From the Khalili Collection, Bath, 1997.
Balbina Martínez Caviró, La loza dorada, Editora Nacional, Madrid 1982, pp. 52-63, plates 39-52.
Gregorio de Mújica, Monografía histórica de la Villa de Eibar, facsimile of 1912, edited by Juan San Martín, Eibar, 1984.