A CARVED IVORY OLIPHANT: CASE NO. 2 (2009-10)

Statement by Dr Paul Williamson, Expert Adviser on Sculpture to the Secretary of State

In my opinion the oliphant satisfies the second and third of the Waverley criteria and I am accordingly objecting to its export.

The provenance of the oliphant

According to an inscription on the box of the oliphant, presumably executed around 1873, ‘The horn came into the family of the Hares of Stow Bardolph through the marriage of Elizabeth, only daughter of Thomas Lord Coventry, Lord Keeper of the Great Seals to King Charles I, with Sir John Hare who was knighted at Newmarket on 4th December 1617. It was alienated for many years until on the death of Henry Blackburn, Esqre, of The Hollies, Tunbridge Wells, it was restored to the present representative, Sir Thomas Hare, Baronet, 1873’. This information essentially follows that laid out by Henry Blackburn himself in 1854, when he spoke on the oliphant to the British Archaeological Association (Archaeological Journal, XI, p.188): it was reported then that the oliphant, ‘regarded as a tenure-horn, … had descended to Mr Blackburn’s mother from the family of Hare, of Stow Hall, Norfolk, descended from the Harcourts of Lorraine. Sir John Hare, knighted by James I, married the only daughter of the lord Keeper Coventry; and their eldest son, Sir Ralph Hare, was created a baronet by Charles I in 1641. It had not been ascertained by what means these royal reliques [other items in the Blackburn collection had also been presented at the meeting] had come into the possession of the family’. It appears that the silver mounts were added on the occasion of, or shortly after, the Coventry-Hare marriage in 1620 (see below).

The oliphant was shown at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857 when still in the possession of Mr Blackburn and wasdiscussed and illustrated in the publication produced the year after (J.B. Waring (ed.), Art Treasures of the United Kingdom from the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester, London, 1858, I, p.15, pl. II).

After being returned to the Hare family in 1873 the whereabouts of the oliphant was lost sight of and it was reported as missing (‘Jetzer Besitzer unbekannt’) in Ernst Kühnel’s great corpus of Islamic ivories in 1971 (Die islamischen Elfenbeinskulpturen VIII.-XIII. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1971, cat. no.81). It was subsequently placed on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1974 to 2007, when it was withdrawn and sold privately by Lady Rose Hare, through Sotheby’s.

Description

The design of the oliphant is divided into three sections. At the mouth of the horn a wide band is carved with a frieze of fighting animals, including a goat, a snake, a lion and a soldier or hunter with sword and basket-like shield; below this are two narrow bands on each side of a plain recess which now holds the silver band to which the foot is attached. The narrow bands are each filled with a long snake which bites its own tail. The main body of the oliphant consists of longitudinal strips filled with numerous animals and birds, both real and fantastic, including a sphinx, harpy, griffin, elephant, serpent and peacock; a single warrior or hunter, dressed in similar fashion to that on the upper band, holds a sword and shield. At the tip are three narrow bands of foliate ornament, the plain recessed areas now covered with a silver band and terminal.

The uppermost of the four later silver mounts covers the rim of the mouth of the horn and is decorated with a scene of a huntsman and hounds in pursuit of hares; two feathered flanges extend into the area of the carved band on each side. The second silver mount is decorated with a running design of roses or poppies issuing from an undulating stem; attached to this is a cockerel foot, and above a ring with dragon loop. The third mount is a ring decorated with a chevron pattern with, above, a ring with dragon loop and below two addorsed creatures, possibly wyverns, acting as the second foot. The tip or terminal is decorated with the same foliate pattern as the second mount, and on it sits a dragon or salamander.

The date and history of the oliphant

The oliphant belongs to a clearly identifiable group brought together by Ernst Kühnel in 1971. Kühnel published thirty oliphants which he described as ‘Saracenic’, and proposed that most of these were made either by Muslim craftsmen or under Islamic influence in South Italy at the end of the eleventh century. The present oliphant was placed in Kühnel’s third group, consisting of six pieces with vertical or longitudinal strips. There is no scholarly consensus, however, over the place of origin of the group, and Avinoam Shalem has recently suggested that they were made for export by Fatimid ivory carvers in Cairo(The Olpihant: Islamic Objects in Historical Context, Leiden, 2004).

Regardless of their place of production, such pieces clearly found their way into cathedral and church treasuries and aristocratic hands in Northern Europe and elsewhere shortly after they were made. A number of examples are recorded in English medieval inventories, most notably that described in the 1295 inventory of St Paul’s Cathedral in London: ‘cornu eburneum gravatum bestiis et avibus, magnum’ (‘a large horn carved with animals and birds’), which was probably of similar form to the oliphant under consideration (for these inventories see Kühnel, op. cit., pp.85-88, and P.Williamson, ‘Ivory carvings in English treasuries before the Reformation’, in D.Buckton and T.A.Heslop (eds), Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture presented to Peter Lasko, Stroud, 1994, pp.193-94). The Horn of Ulph in York Minster, although of different type, has been kept in York since the eleventh century. There are now only two oliphants of Kühnel’s ‘Saracenic’ type in the United Kingdom, in Edinburgh (National MuseumsScotland) and London (Victoria and AlbertMuseum).

It is not known when the present oliphant arrived in England, although there is a strong likelihood that this was in the Middle Ages. There was a medieval English tradition of horns being presented as symbols of the transfer of land, becoming known as horns of tenure; and hunting was one of the key activities which took place on such land (see J.Cherry, ‘Symbolism and survival: medieval horns of tenure’, Antiquaries Journal, LXIX, 1989, pp.111-18). It seems probable that the oliphant was presented in just this way at the wedding of Sir Thomas Coventry’s daughter Elizabeth to Sir John Hare in 1620 (indenture-settlement in Norfolk Record Office). The Coventry family was granted arms in 1606 and took a cockerel as their crest, which would explain the foot added at that time, and the hare-hunt on the uppermost mount might be intended as a rebus on the Coventry-Hare marriage. From a stylistic standpoint a date of 1620 for the silver mounts is entirely acceptable.

Bibliography

Blackburn 1854, op. cit., p.188; Waring 1858, op. cit., p.15, pl. III; H.Graeven, Frühchristliche und mittelalterliche Elfenbeinwerkein in photographischer Nachbildung, Serie I. Aus Sammlungen in England, Rome, 1898, p.31; A.Maskell, Ivories, London, 1905, p.242; Kühnel 1971, op. cit., pp.13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, cat. no.81, pl. LXXXI; Shalem 2004, op. cit., pp.48-49, 63, 99, 111, 123, 129.

The oliphant and the Waverley criteria

The oliphant is a fine and extremely well-preserved example of a type of object known only in limited numbers and in my opinion is of outstanding aesthetic importance. Its appearance is enhanced rather than diminished by the later silver additions.

The oliphant is the only example of the three existing in the United Kingdom to show a decorative system of longitudinal strips rather than the more usual scheme of inhabited medallions. It is of outstanding significance not only because of its condition, visual repertoire and rarity, but also because of its post-medieval history and transformation, which is without parallel in the other surviving examples.

31 March 2009