Floral still life painting, oil on canvas, 24” h. X 18 1/8” w., depicting a colourful bouquet of flowers, in a blue vase, resting on a stripped round table,  More »

Floral still life painting, oil on canvas, 24” h. X 18 1/8” w., depicting a colourful bouquet of flowers, in a blue vase, resting on a stripped round table, painted by listed artist Albert Bertalan (Hungarian, 1899-1957), signed lower left.   « Less

Decorative Three Panel Print framed in a contemporary black frame, subject matter of three different scenes of nature scenes of sand, H:22" W:44".  More »

Decorative Three Panel Print framed in a contemporary black frame, subject matter of three different scenes of nature scenes of sand, H:22" W:44". LifestyleAntiques.com is the web site where one can shop on line or if you are in the area we are an antique dealer in Summerland, California just 3 minutes south of Santa Barbara. Specializing in European Antique Furniture and our accent is antique lighting for your home, or office with handmade parchment shades adorning the selection of unique lamps. We specialize in Decorative Arts and French furniture as well as antique furniture from Spain and Italy, you will find the shop warm and inviting.   « Less

Pair of Exceptional Hand Colored Antique Prints of Eggs and Nests, H:15" W:12". Located in the heart of Summerland, California, Lifestyle Antiques & Interiors  More »

Pair of Exceptional Hand Colored Antique Prints of Eggs and Nests, H:15" W:12". Located in the heart of Summerland, California, Lifestyle Antiques & Interiors offers the finest high-end Antiques, Decorative Arts, and Home Furnishings on the South Coast. We feature a rich collection from Europe, specializing in Italian Furniture, French and Spanish. The elegant collection varies from antique and Murano lamps, decorative pillows, Chandeliers, Mirrors and a fine selection of home furnishings. Just 3 minutes south of Santa Barbara. For your convenience you may shop on line: www.lifestyleantiques.com .   « Less

19th C. Hand Colored Botnical Print in Gilt Frame

19th C. Hand Colored Botnical Print in Gilt Frame   « Less

This is an exceptional Early Botanical Hand Colored Print, Legerstroemia Regia, Peint d'apres nature par Madame Berthe Hoods van Nooten, a Batavia Chronolith, par G.  More »

This is an exceptional Early Botanical Hand Colored Print, Legerstroemia Regia, Peint d'apres nature par Madame Berthe Hoods van Nooten, a Batavia Chronolith, par G. Severeyns Lith. De L'Acad.Rpy. de Belgique. H:29" W:22.5" (incl. frame). The age of exploration also marks the beginning of gardening as a passion throughout Europe. The concept of making prints from metal plates originated in Germany and Italy. Copper engraving, and later copper etching, allowed artists to create a line as fine as the most delicate part of any plant or flower. A copper engraving is produced by incising a line with a sharp tool directly onto a polished copper surface. An etching differs in that a line is actually etched into the plate by acid. In both instances recessed or cut areas become the recipient of the ink. That, along with the invention of movable type, necessitated separating picture from text. This combination and interest facilitated the making pictures that could stand on their own as works of art. It was not until the beginning of the 19th century that these paths finally merged and truly great art resulted from a hybrid movement of science and art. At the same time in France, court patronage of flower painting was initiated by Marie de Medicis, bringing from Florence the tradition of providing patronage for natural history art and science. This interest and exploration of Botanical art and the science of botany were simultaneously experiencing a history of genius in the early 18th century. The 18th and first half of the 19th centuries are the Golden Age of Botanical Art. These early artists of the 18th and 19th Century have made an indelible impression on our culture and the significance of their artistic contribution will only increase over time.   « Less

Set of Four 19th Century "Botanique" Prints, Framed

Set of Four 19th Century "Botanique" Prints, Framed   « Less

A Fine French ;Early 19th Century Botanical Engraving of Nymphaea Nelumbo, from ;''Description de l''Egypte'', Image by Mr. Delile, 1809-1813 The engraving depicts a  More »

A Fine French ;Early 19th Century Botanical Engraving of Nymphaea Nelumbo, from ;''Description de l''Egypte'', Image by Mr. Delile, 1809-1813 The engraving depicts a Nymphaea Nelumbo. ;To the top left is the following NH botanique par Mr. Delile and named on bottom 1.2.5 Nymphaea Nelumbo. ;To the top right Plate 61. Dimensions: 27 1/2 inches high x 35 inches wide. Nelumbo nucifera, known by a number of names including Indian Lotus, Sacred Lotus, Bean of India, or simply Lotus, is a plant in the Nelumbonaceae family. Botanically, Nelumbo nucifera (Gaertn.) may also be referred to by its former names, Nelumbium speciosum (Willd.) or Nymphaea nelumbo. This plant is an aquatic perennial. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelumbo_nucifera) ;''Description de l''Egypte'', the seminal publication by the French government detailing the results of the Napoleon''s pioneering military and scientific expedition to Egypt (1798-1801) and the first comprehensive illustrated description of ancient and modern Egypt. Reference: From: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_de_l''%C3%89gypte) The Description de l''Égypte (English: Description of Egypt) was a series of publications, appearing first in 1809 and continuing until the final volume appeared in 1829, which offered a comprehensive scientific description of ancient and modern Egypt as well as its natural history. It is the collaborative work of about 160 civilian scholars and scientists, known popularly as the savants, who accompanied Napoleon''s expedition to Egypt in 1798 to 1801 as part of the French Revolutionary Wars, as well as about 2000 artists and technicians, including 400 engravers, who would later compile it into a full work. The full title of the work is Description de l''Égypte, ou Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Égypte pendant l''expédition de l''armée française (English: Description of Egypt, or the collection of observations and research which was made in Egypt during the expedition of the French Army). Summary Approximately 160 civilian scholars and scientists, many drawn from the Institut de France, collaborated on the Description. Collectively they comprised the Commission des Sciences et Arts d''Égypte. About a third of them would later also become members of the Institute of Egypt. In late August 1798, on the order of Napoleon, the Institute of Egypt (l''Institut d''Égypte) was founded in the palace of Hassan-Kashif on the outskirts of Cairo, with Gaspard Monge as president.[1] The structure of the institute was based on the Institut de France. The institute housed a library, laboratories, workshops, and the savants'' various Egyptian collections. The workshop was particularly important, supplying both the army as well as the servants with necessary equipment. Many new instruments were constructed as well, to replace those lost during the sinking of the French fleet in August 1798 at Aboukir Bay (Battle of the Nile) and the Cairo riot of October 1798. One of the goals of the Institute was to propagate knowledge. To this end, the savants published a journal, La Decade Egyptienne, as well as a newspaper, the Courier de L''Egypte, which disseminated information about the French occupation and the activities of the French army, the Commission des Sciences et Arts d''Égypte, and the Institute itself. The vision of a single comprehensive publication amalgamating all that the French discovered in Egypt was conceived already in November 1798, when Joseph Fourier was entrusted with the task of uniting the reports from the various disciplines for later publication. When the French army left Egypt in 1801, the savants took with them a large quantities of unpublished notes, drawings, and various collections of smaller artifacts that they could smuggle unnoticed past the British. In February 1802, at the instigation of Jean Antoine Chaptal, the French Minister of the Interior, and by decree of Napoleon, a commission was established to manage the preparation of the large amount of data for a single publication. The final work would draw data from the already-published journal La Decade, the newspaper Courier de L''Égypte, the four-volume Mémoires sur l''Égypte (an expansion of the La Decade journal, published by the French government during and after the Egyptian campaign) and an abundance of notes and illustrations from the various scholars and scientists. The huge volume of information to be published meant adopting an apparently haphazard modus operandi: when sufficiently many plates or text on a particular subject were ready, the information was published. Despite this, publication of the first edition took over 20 years. The first test volumes of engravings were presented to Napoleon in January 1808. Initially published by order of the emperor (Napoleon Le Grand), successive volumes would be published by order of the king, and the last simply by order of the government. A second edition (known as the Panckoucke edition) was published by Charles Louis Fleury Panckoucke. The text was expanded in more volumes and printed in a smaller formats, new pulls were taken from the plates, and these were bound with many of the large format plates folded in the smaller format volumes. The typographical quality of the texts, the beauty of engravings, and the unusual formats (the Mammutfolio is 1m x .81m) makes Description de l''Égypte an exceptional work. The first edition usually consists of nine volumes of text, one volume with description of the plates and ten volumes of plates. Two additional volumes in Mammut size (also called Elephant plates) contain plates from Antiquites and Etat Moderne and finally one volume of map plates (Atlas), making for twenty-three volumes in all. Variants in the number of volumes does exist. The second edition usually consists of thirty-seven volumes, with twenty-four volumes bound in twenty-six books (volume eighteen is a volume split in three books) of text, volume number ten being the description of the plates and ten volumes of plates, plus one volume of maps. The second edition was made at less cost, and is in black and white; the frontispiece, however, is rendered in full color (the exact reverse of the first edition, in which the frontispiece is black and white while the rest is color). The ten volumes of plates consists of 894 plates, made from over 3000 drawings, most of them located in Histoire Naturelle volume I and II. Some of these plates contain over 100 individual engravings of flora or fauna on a single plate. 38 of the plates are hand coloured. Some variants of the work may contain a few more plates; example Bernard J. Shapero Rare Books list a 38 volume second edition with 909 plates. The plates have been republished partly or in full if different works, most notable by Taschen GmbH since 1995, which is a complete reproduction of the 10 volumes of plates, though not the 52 plates of the atlas volume. Influence The influence of this work on the nascent field of Egyptology, in every country to which it was sent, is difficult to gauge. At the same time, country-specific studies of the work''s reception have been written [2]. While a colossal achievement and one frequently referenced in major publications concerning Egypt and its history, the work''s limitations quickly became apparent. The general conception and often-repeated idea that this is a unique and unprecedented work is inaccurate. ;There are several works from the 18th century and even 17th century that do much the same as Description de l''Égypte, on a smaller scale. Works such as John Greaves, Pyramidographia (1646), Bernard de Montfaucon''s, 10 volume L''Antiquite expliquee et representee en figures (1719-1724), which reproduces, methodically grouped, all the ancient monuments and devoted a notable amount to Egyptian objects, Benoît de Maillet, Description de l''Égypte (1735), Richard Pococke, A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1743), Frederic Louis Norden, Voyage d''Egypte et de Nubie (1755) and Carsten Niebuhr''s highly influential two volume Reisebeschreibung von Arabien und anderen umliegenden Ländern (1774 & 1778), can be seen as mini Description de l''Egypte in their own right, and their literate and pictorial influence might actually be greater than Description de l''Egypte, as they stood uncontested and often uncorrected for many more years. The very long time it took to publish this work meant that a large part of it, at least the text, though near encyclopaediac in nature, was quickly out of date once it arrived in the hands of people interested in these matters. This was not notable for the description of modern Egypt in the work; however, for the description of ancient Egypt it was. The text is written without the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphics, and the work represents the last major work to be written before the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, which would slowly become available, just as the first volumes of the large expanded text of the second edition, were printed. The root for the text is found 20 years earlier, and not only did a lot happen in those 20 years, but soon, Jean-François Champollion found the way to read hieroglyphs (greatly helped by Thomas Young''s initial work). Though Champollion’s Grammaire egyptienne, published posthumously in 1836, was not widely accepted until years later, the text of Description de l''Egypte would, in a decade or two, become largely obsolete. Another aspect is its accessibility. The low number of copies made ( 1000), its high price, and its very large physical size made the work accessible practically only to the very elite of society at that time. Even today, finding a complete copy (text and drawings) is not easy. Only major libraries or state libraries are in the possession of such and a complete reproduction or translation into other languages has, to the best of knowledge, never been done. All this should be seen in stark contrast to Karl Richard Lepsius''s 12 volume masterpiece Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (1849-1859), which to this day is quoted repeatedly as both source and authority on various ancient Egyptian matters and is considered the earliest reliable publications on a large selection of monuments. Notes 1. ; ; ;Louis de Laus de Boisy, “The Institute of Egypt,” Napoleon: Symbol for an Age, A Brief History with Documents, ed. Rafe Blaufarb (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008), 45-48. 2. ; ; ;Bednarski, A. (2005) Holding Egypt: tracing the reception of the Description de l''Egypte in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Goldenhouse Publications. ISBN 0-9550256-0-5 3. ; ; ;On page four the title page year is given as 1821. 4. ; ; ;On page four the titlepage is given as "Explication Des Planches" dated 1821. On ; ; ; ; ; ;page six the title page is given as "Tome Dixieme Explication Des Planches" dated ; ; ; ; ;1826.   « Less

A Chinese Watercolour and Gouache on Pith Paper Painting of a Basket of Flowers, Circa 1850-60 The watercolour painting is on pith paper formerly called rice paper. ;It  More »

A Chinese Watercolour and Gouache on Pith Paper Painting of a Basket of Flowers, Circa 1850-60 The watercolour painting is on pith paper formerly called rice paper. ;It depicts a basket filled to overflowing with flowers. ;The painting is within an eglomise and dedcoupage frame. Frame size: 17½ x 13½ inches China Trade watercolours, although produced as early as the late 18th century, enjoyed the height of their popularity in the 1840’s and ‘50’s. ;Travels to China were difficult and expensive, and those from the West that could afford to make the journey did not wish to return empty-handed. Similar to the Grand Tour of the Continent, China was one of the ultimate elite destinations and anything of quality that was brought back immediately became status symbols. Watercolours, available in a variety of subjects and quite handsomely bound, were a popular choice not only due to their aesthetics, but also because of the ease of which they could be carried; large oil paintings and bulky ceramic objects did not lend themselves well to transport. Although a commodity produced for business, the watercolours were very well done, often by well-respected artists. Many of the artists did not work in watercolours often; one of the most respected artists at the time, Sunqua, painted primarily in oils. He worked in watercolor and gouache in the 1830’s- late 1840’s, producing albums and single paintings for export and trade during this time. He was an accomplished artist, whom Crossman says: “...would seem to belong to an Italian or European tradition of ship and port painting”, so good were his compositions and palettes. The first cultural exchanges appeared in the 16th century, when Italian Jesuit missionaries began filtering into China; as the literati widely rejected their Christian teachings, the Italians hurried to find another channel though which to forge bonds in the East. They began sending accomplished artists and teaching European painting techniques instead, forming a particular aesthetic that remained popular for centuries. The earliest China Trade pictures were produced on both Chinese and European paper; “Beginning in the 1780’s, the Chinese artists used western paper for most of their watercolours for the export trade… Supplying the Chinese with the raw materials for a product which was to be sold in the West was not unusual, since it occurred in many fields of manufacture. The other paper commonly used for watercolours and gouaches after 1800 or 1810, was pith, which has been mistakenly called ‘rice’ paper, both at that time and today…’ The so-called rice paper is made of the pith of the Aralia papyrifera. The pith is soaked before cutting; the workman then applies the blade to the cylinders of pith, and, turning them round dexterously, pares them from the circumference to the centre, making a rolled layer of equal thickness throughout’. The pith paper was a very fragile medium on which to work, and many of the watercolours on pith which have survived are cracked and broken.” The pictures were then mounted into albums with a silk ribbon, often blue but not always, and bound between boards covered with brightly coloured and patterned silk. Although it was extremely fragile, pith paper was widely favored due to its nature; the gouache used by the Chinese sat on the surface of the paper and produced a bright and sparkling effect. Very fine detail could be achieved whilst maintaining clean, vibrant colours. The material did not lend itself to the flat wash of colour favoured for European watercolours. Gouache, from the Italian guazzo, "water paint, splash") is a type of paint consisting of pigment suspended in water. Gouache differs from watercolour in that the particles are larger, the ratio of pigment to water is much higher and there is the presence of an inert white pigment, such as chalk. This makes gouache heavier and more opaque, with greater reflective qualities. Popular subjects included Chinese costumes, birds- often with richly painted backgrounds, fish, insects and junks and sampans. The shimmering paint served to heighten the exotic nature of the works, and the charming naiveté added to the perceived indigenous nature of the paintings. The art was made “…for strangers, strangers with an entirely different set of aesthetic presumptions and expectations, stands outside the major currents of art produced for a Chinese audience. It occupies a space which is neither wholly Chinese nor wholly European, but which can, by the nature of the compromises it makes, tell us a lot about how one culture saw the other in the age before photography. It did not exist separately from, but rather as an integral part of, the relationship between China and the West…” Although produced in the mid-19th century, the works remain as naïve, exotic and desirable now as they did when seen for the first time.   « Less

A French Shellwork Picture of Flowers, Circa 1840-60 The shells mounted on a gilt plaque in the form of flowers and leaves. ;The plaque within a wood shadow box.  More »

A French Shellwork Picture of Flowers, Circa 1840-60 The shells mounted on a gilt plaque in the form of flowers and leaves. ;The plaque within a wood shadow box. Dimensions: 13 1/2 inches x 12 inches   « Less

Fine 20th C American Watercolor ''Chinese Red Peonies'' Artist: Tekla Moore

Fine 20th C American Watercolor ''Chinese Red Peonies'' Artist: Tekla Moore   « Less