A CARVED IVORY OLIPHANT: CASE NO. 2 (2009-10)
Statement by Dr Paul Williamson, Expert Adviser on Sculpture to the Secretary of
State
In my opinion the oliphant satisfies the second and third of the Waverley criteria and I
am accordingly objecting to its export.
The provenance of the oliphant
According to an inscription on the box of the oliphant, presumably executed around
1873, ‘The horn came into the family of the Hares of Stow Bardolph through the
marriage of Elizabeth, only daughter of Thomas Lord Coventry, Lord Keeper of the
Great Seals to King Charles I, with Sir John Hare who was knighted at Newmarket on
4th December 1617. It was alienated for many years until on the death of Henry
Blackburn, Esqre , of The Hollies, Tunbridge Wells, it was restored to the present
representative, Sir Thomas Hare, Baronet, 1873’. This information essentially
follows that laid out by Henry Blackburn himself in 1854, when he spoke on the
oliphant to the British Archaeological Association (Archaeological Journal, XI,
p.188): it was reported then that the oliphant, ‘regarded as a tenure-horn, … had
descended to Mr Blackburn’s mother from the family of Hare, of Stow Hall, Norfolk,
descended from the Harcourts of Lorraine. Sir John Hare, knighted by James I,
married the only daughter of the lord Keeper Coventry; and their eldest son, Sir Ralph
Hare, was created a baronet by Charles I in 1641. It had not been ascertained by what
means these royal reliques [other items in the Blackburn collection had also been
presented at the meeting] had come into the possession of the family’. It appears that
the silver mounts were added on the occasion of, or shortly after, the Coventry-Hare
marriage in 1620 (see below).
The oliphant was shown at the Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester in 1857 when
still in the possession of Mr Blackburn and was discussed and illustrated in the
publication produced the year after (J.B. Waring (ed.), Art Treasures of the United
Kingdom from the Art Treasures Exhibition, Manchester, London, 1858, I, p.15, pl.
II).
After being returned to the Hare family in 1873 the whereabouts of the oliphant was
lost sight of and it was reported as missing (‘Jetzer Besitzer unbekannt’) in Ernst
Kühnel’s great corpus of Islamic ivories in 1971 (Die islamischen
Elfenbeinskulpturen VIII.-XIII. Jahrhundert, Berlin, 1971, cat. no.81). It was
subsequently placed on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1974 to 2007,
when it was withdrawn and sold privately by Lady Rose Hare, through Sotheby’s.
Description
The design of the oliphant is divided into three sections. At the mouth of the horn a
wide band is carved with a frieze of fighting animals, including a goat, a snake, a lion
and a soldier or hunter with sword and basket-like shield; below this are two narrow
bands on each side of a plain recess which now holds the silver band to which the foot
is attached. The narrow bands are each filled with a long snake which bites its own
tail. The main body of the oliphant consists of longitudinal strips filled with
numerous animals and birds, both real and fantastic, including a sphinx, harpy, griffin,
elephant, serpent and peacock; a single warrior or hunter, dressed in similar fashion to
that on the upper band, holds a sword and shield. At the tip are three narrow bands of
foliate ornament, the plain recessed areas now covered with a silver band and terminal.
The uppermost of the four later silver mounts covers the rim of the mouth of the horn
and is decorated with a scene of a huntsman and hounds in pursuit of hares; two
feathered flanges extend into the area of the carved band on each side. The second
silver mount is decorated with a running design of roses or poppies issuing from an
undulating stem; attached to this is a cockerel foot, and above a ring with dragon loop.
The third mount is a ring decorated with a chevron pattern with, above, a ring with
dragon loop and below two addorsed creatures, possibly wyverns, acting as the
second foot. The tip or terminal is decorated with the same foliate pattern as the
second mount, and on it sits a dragon or salamander.
The date and history of the oliphant
The oliphant belongs to a clearly identifiable group brought together by Ernst Kühnel
in 1971. Kühnel published thirty oliphants which he described as ‘Saracenic’, and
proposed that most of these were made either by Muslim craftsmen or under Islamic
influence in South Italy at the end of the eleventh century. The present oliphant was
placed in Kühnel’s third group, consisting of six pieces with vertical or longitudinal
strips. There is no scholarly consensus, however, over the place of origin of the group,
and Avinoam Shalem has recently suggested that they were made for export by
Fatimid ivory carvers in Cairo (The Olpihant: Islamic Objects in Historical Context,
Leiden, 2004).
Regardless of their place of production, such pieces clearly found their way into
cathedral and church treasuries and aristocratic hands in Northern Europe and
elsewhere shortly after they were made. A number of examples are recorded in
English medieval inventories, most notably that described in the 1295 inventory of St
Paul’s Cathedral in London: ‘cornu eburneum gravatum bestiis et avibus, magnum’
(‘a large horn carved with animals and birds’), which was probably of similar form to
the oliphant under consideration (for these inventories see Kühnel, op. cit., pp.85-88,
and P.Williamson, ‘Ivory carvings in English treasuries before the Reformation’, in
D.Buckton and T.A.Heslop (eds), Studies in Medieval Art and Architecture presented
to Peter Lasko, Stroud, 1994, pp.193-94). The Horn of Ulph in York Minster,
although of different type, has been kept in York since the eleventh century. There
are now only two oliphants of Kühnel’s ‘Saracenic’ type in the United Kingdom, in
Edinburgh (National Museums Scotland) and London (Victoria and Albert Museum).
It is not known when the present oliphant arrived in England, although there is a
strong likelihood that this was in the Middle Ages. There was a medieval English
tradition of horns being presented as symbols of the transfer of land, becoming known
as horns of tenure; and hunting was one of the key activities which took place on such
land (see J.Cherry, ‘Symbolism and survival: medieval horns of tenure’, Antiquaries
Journal, LXIX, 1989, pp.111-18). It seems probable that the oliphant was presented
in just this way at the wedding of Sir Thomas Coventry’s daughter Elizabeth to Sir
John Hare in 1620 (indenture-settlement in Norfolk Record Office). The Coventry
family was granted arms in 1606 and took a cockerel as their crest, which would
explain the foot added at that time, and the hare-hunt on the uppermost mount might
be intended as a rebus on the Coventry-Hare marriage. From a stylistic standpoint a
date of 1620 for the silver mounts is entirely acceptable.
Bibliography
Blackburn 1854, op. cit., p.188; Waring 1858, op. cit., p.15, pl. III; H.Graeven,
Frühchristliche und mittelalterliche Elfenbeinwerkein in photographischer
Nachbildung, Serie I. Aus Sammlungen in England, Rome, 1898, p.31; A.Maskell,
Ivories, London, 1905, p.242; Kühnel 1971, op. cit., pp.13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24,
cat. no.81, pl. LXXXI; Shalem 2004, op. cit., pp.48-49, 63, 99, 111, 123, 129.
The oliphant and the Waverley criteria
The oliphant is a fine and extremely well-preserved example of a type of object
known only in limited numbers and in my opinion is of outstanding aesthetic
importance. Its appearance is enhanced rather than diminished by the later silver
additions.
The oliphant is the only example of the three existing in the United Kingdom to show
a decorative system of longitudinal strips rather than the more usual scheme of
inhabited medallions. It is of outstanding significance not only because of its
condition, visual repertoire and rarity, but also because of its post-medieval history
and transformation, which is without parallel in the other surviving examples.
31 March 2009