Richly Carved Olifant Decorated With Coats Of Arms With The Arms Of France And King, 19th Century

Richly carved ivory olifant, depicting a hunting scene with a lion attacking a horse and decoration of two medallions probably representing Napoleon I and Henry IV, the base with acanthus leaves and crowned coat of arms with the Arms of France. Probably Dieppe work from the 19th Century Olifants, formerly spelled oliphants, are musical instruments from the horn family Made from elephant tusks, olifants are in fact hunting horns, but they are mainly war horns which were the distinctive mark of great aristocrats and military commanders Particularly prized in the Middle Ages, they were essentially sculpted with hunting scenes or attributes (see a copy kept at the Army Museum in Paris) and more rarely, with religious subjects such as an olifant, known as "Charlemagne's olifant", which is part of the collections of the Cluny Museum. In the second half of the 19th century, the renewed interest in medieval literature and objects led to the creation of new models of olifants made in the spirit of the Middle Ages; it is in this context that the two examples that we present with historical connotation were sculpted, since they are decorated with profiles of kings of France and Poland. Some olifants made at the same period present similarities in style and iconography, they are sometimes linked to the production of Dieppe ivory sculptor artists of the time; let us cite in particular a first model highlighted with coats of arms sold in Paris, Daguerre, on March 13, 2009, lot 186; a second, with profiles of sovereigns and fleur-de-lys, on sale in Paris, Coutau-Bégarie, on March 3, 2010, lot 102; a third, decorated with the figure of Diane de Poitiers and Henri II, offered at auction at Christie's, in New York, on November 25, 2003, lot 436; finally, let us mention a last copy, kept at the Commercy museum, illustrated in Tardy, Les ivoires, Paris, 1977, p140