Italian, early 19th century

Prince Stanislas Poniatowski (1754-1833);

his sale, Christie's, London, 1839, lot 1471;

Northwick, Worcestershire;

Phillips, London, 4 August 1859, lot 693

Catalogue des pierres graves antiques de S.A. le Prince Stanislas Poniatowski, 1830-1833, no. IX.1.47;

Beazley Archive, University of Oxford, Poniatowski Database, no. 40002088 [https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/7A4BDD1E-BE30-4559-80F2-180F0DC80AB1; accessed 3 June 2024]

This fine intaglio is one of the so-called Poniatowski gems. This group of around 2,500 gems were commissioned in the first decades of the 19th-century by the Polish aristocrat Prince Stanislas Poniatowski (1754-1833) from a number of skilled gem engravers active in Rome, who drew on literary sources including Homer, Virgil and Ovid, to create beautiful and original compositions. They are often frieze like in design and in this respect recall the line drawings of Neoclassical artist John Flaxman. Poniatowski catalogued them in his lifetime and encouraged the belief that they were in fact ancient gems. The collection was sold after his death, at Christie's in 1839, but the sale was unsuccessful, with many collectors outraged at what they saw as an assemblage of gems designed to deceive. Many of the Poniatowski gems were acquired by an English collector named John Tyrrell, who bought them as an investment and subsequently published them himself. There is no complete set of impressions, although the Beazley archive at Oxford University have created a growing Poniatowski database. In recent years Poniatowski gems have increasingly been seen as important examples of Neoclassical art in their own right, engraved by leading gem cutters including the likes of Luigi Pichler, and some even thought to have been ancient.