A match-striker in the form of a statuette of an elderly fishmonger
French School
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
c. 1850 - 1880
Materials
Spelter
Measurements
175 mm (Height); 75 mm (Diameter)
Place of origin
France
Collection
The Argory, County Armagh
NT 565251
Summary
Sculpture, spelter; a match-striker in the form of a woman selling fish; French; c. 1850-80. The statuette of an elderly fishmonger, with a large basket on her back. The basket is for the storage of matches, whilst the rough cast surface of its tall back served for striking and lighting them.
Full description
A match-striker in the form of a spelter figure of an elderly fishmonger. A standing figure of a woman, who holds out before her a wicker tray designed to fit round her front, and on which are laid her fish for sale. Her left hand is on her hip, as she calls out to advertise her stock. On her back the woman wears a deep wicker basket with a tall back, in which there is a rectangular hole just above the height of her head, perhaps indicating a missing element. On an integral circular base. This statuette is a match-striker, a utensil designed to hold matches, and incorporating a surface on which they could be struck and lit. Here the basket would have served to hold matches, whilst the cast surface of the back of the wicker basket, with its raised weaved patterns, would have been used as the striking board. Match-strikers were popular in Europe in the nineteenth century, when smoking became commonplace in households and there was a rapid growth in the use of matches, after the invention of the modern self-igniting match in Paris in 1805. Especially in France, where they are known as pyrogènes, these utensils were made in an extraordinary range of inventive designs, in bronze and other metals, but also in ceramics and glass. An inkstand with Gavin Douglas Fine Antiques Ltd (November 2022), said to be Regency and datable to c. 1815, has in the centre a figure of a boy with a very similar basket for a match-striker. However, the fisherwoman at the Argory was probably produced in France and rather later in the nineteeth century. It is one of a number of other bronze objects in the collection at the Argory (e.g. NT 565253) made around the period of the so-called Second Empire (Napoleon III, reigned 1852-1870), when there was a huge expansion in the mass production of decorative objects in metal. The match-striker looks as if it is made of bronze, but is probably made from the much cheaper spelter, an alloy of lead and zinc. Jeremy Warren November 2022
Provenance
By descent; Walter McGeough Bond (1908-86), by whom given to the National Trust in 1979.
Makers and roles
French School, sculptor