Small Art Nouveau Vase With Spiders And Thistles

Iconographic registers dear to the Art Nouveau vocabulary. On the body, two large, finely chiseled spider webs are set in reserves left free by the applied ornamentation. At the center of each web is a spider modeled in high relief, its body smooth and rounded, its legs articulated and rendered with entomological realism. Between the webs, thistle-flowered scapes rise from the base, treated in application: sinuous stem, serrated leaves and spiny flowerheads in full bloom, in keeping with the plant repertoire of the late 19th century.

The openwork base, cut with coiled foliage, extends the naturalistic decoration and gives the object its silhouette characteristic of turn-of-the-century production. The base features a central hole, probably the remnant of an earlier assembly.

The union of thistle and spider, a rarer motif belonging to the naturalistic symbolism cultivated at the end of the 19th century, testifies to the period's taste for a symbol-laden plant and entomological repertoire.

France, circa 1900.