By the eagle eyed Xavier F. Salomon, the Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery.
“A few months ago, together with the Gallery’s frame conservator, Tom Proctor, I was going through an off-site storage space in the basement of Dulwich College when the two of us stumbled upon two dusty cardboard boxes.
Spot the vases - 'Mausoleum and Picture Gallery with God's Gift College, Dulwich' JM Gandy 1823
On both of them were labels addressed to John Sheeran, one of my predecessors as Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery in the 1980s. It was clear that no one had looked inside those boxes for a very long time.
Inside them – covered in straw – were two beautiful marble vases in pieces. The bases were broken off and parts of the lids broken. The decision was immediately taken that they should return to the Gallery, so Tom and I lifted the heavy objects and brought them back.
I knew I had seen the vases before and found a black and white photograph of them displayed in the Mausoleum at Dulwich over the sarcophagi, in the same place where the busts of the founders are now. It is not clear when the vases were removed and damaged.
One of the vases in the Gandi picture
The vase now
Even more exciting was the spotting of the two vases in J.M. Gandy’s famous watercolour of the interior of the Picture Gallery from 1823, showing the two vases under the pair of Empire-style console tables, and next to the so-called “Mrs Desenfans’ chairs” then upholstered in blue. It soon became apparent that these are the “two marble vases” left, together with the furniture, by Margaret Desenfans to the Gallery in her will of 1813. We do not know where the vases were made or when and research is now being carried out on the topic.
The vases have now been beautifully restored by at Neil Perry-Smith’s studio in Forest Hill and have just returned to the Gallery. Fittingly they have been displayed underneath the console tables in Gallery 5, in the same position where Gandy showed them in 1823.”
Xavier keeps finding works of art in bits. Read his article of his discovery of a part of a large Veronese altarpiece – ‘Finding Veronese’
