Side 1: Male musician with drum and whistle; bearded male dancers; female dancer; dancing jester holding a bauble; moresca.
Side 2: two hunters on foot; hunter blowing a horn; archer shooting a stag; arrow in the stag's chest; dogs pursuing a stag; tree; sun; bow.
Crosshatched background; roped border; foliated decoration with flowers (roses).
Koechlin 1924: France, 2nd half of the 15th century.
Longhurst 1929: France, 2nd half of the 15th century.
Randall 1993: French (Alsace) or German (Black Forest), 1440-1470.
Williamson and Davies 2014: South Netherlands, c. 1440-70.
Attribution
Unknown
Polychromy - Gilding
Traces of red staining.
Reverse
Carved on both sides.
Object Condition
Missing: some teeth.
Vertical break on one side: the two pieces have been glued back into place.
Provenance
In the possession of John Webb (b. 1799, d. 1880), London: purchased from him by the Museum in 1867.
Bibliography
Catalogue of the Special Exhibition of Works of Art of the Mediaeval, Renaissance, and more recent periods on loan at the South Kensington Museum, June 1862..., revised edition, exhibition catalogue (London, 1863), no. 148.
Inventory of the Objects in the Art Division of the Museum at South Kensington, arranged according to the dates of their acquisition (London, 1868), I, p. 6.
W. Maskell, Ivories Ancient and Mediaeval in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1872), p. 27.
F. Winter, Die Kämmer aller Zeiten (1906), pl. 40. no. 116.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, pp. 428-429; II, no. 1153; III, pl. CXCIII.
M. Longhurst, Catalogue of Carvings in Ivory, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2 vols (London, 1927 and 1929), II (1929), p. 54, pl. XLIX.
Tardy, Les Ivoires (Paris, 1966), p. 136.
R. H. Randall, The Golden Age of Ivory: Gothic Ivory Carvings in North American Collections (New York, 1993), p. 128 (in relation to no. 195).
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003), p. 558.
J. Cherry and J. Lowden, Medieval Ivories and Works of Art: The Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, 2008), p.125.
P. Nuttall, 'The Bargello gamesboard: a north-south hybrid', in The Burlington Magazine, vol. CLII, no. 1292 (November 2010), p. 720, fig. 8.
P. Nuttall, 'Dancing, love and the ’beautiful game’. A new interpretation of a group of fifteenth-century ’gaming’ boxes’, in Renaissance Studies 24 (2010), pp. 128-29, figs. 5-6.
P. Williamson and G. Davies, Medieval Ivory Carvings 1200-1550 (London, 2014), no. 216.
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