19C Anglo Indian Highly Carved Padouk and Mosaic Folio Cover - RARE

PRESENTING A RARE AND DESIRABLE 19C Anglo Indian Highly Carved Padouk and Mosaic Folio Cover.

This is a VERY RARE piece of Anglo-Indian and British Victorian Colonial history!

From circa 1870-80, it is a highly carved Padouk wood cover with raised carved reliefs, bordered with Sadeli Mosaic from Bombay and edged in faux ivory/ivorine and ebony stringing.

The fact that this is a Book/Folio Cover, for the holding and keeping of your books or manuscripts, in ‘good order’, is what makes this piece so RARE!

We have been collecting Anglo-Indian items for over 25 years and have only ever seen 1 or 2 others!

The reliefs are highly carved with birds, animals and foliage.

Inside each side of the Cover, it opens to a GORGEOUS and ORIGINAL purple velvet ….. STUNNING!

The Sadeli mosaic is in very good CONDITION, some very minor losses, for something so delicate and so old, it is a miracle it has survived so well!

SADELI MOSAIC: “Anglo Indian boxes were made in India for the English residents from the early part of the 18th century. They were brought back or sent back to England usually by the people who had commissioned them. From the beginning of the nineteenth century they were imported more commercially, although not in any significant numbers until the middle decades. They were very highly valued, especially the early ones, to the extent that the designs were copied on late 19th and early 20th century tins.

The ancient art of Sadeli Mosaic is said to have been introduced from Shiraz in Persia via Sind to Bombay, a long time before the Anglo Indian boxes were made. It was a technique, which required a high degree of skill and patience. It was executed very lavishly, in that the frequent cuts wasted a great amount of the precious materials used. The workmanship was however more than commensurable to the value of the materials.

Ivory, silver, pewter (or other metals), wood and horn were cut into faceted rods which were bound together to form geometric patterns. When the glue has set, the rods were sliced in transverse sections. This gave the maker a number of angled circular pieces in the original pattern. Several variations of patterns could be achieved by combining the materials in different ways. The ivory was sometimes dyed green to give an extra color.

The mosaic pieces in a combination of patterns, often separated by ivory, ebony, horn or silver stringing were used to veneer sandalwood boxes. In the early boxes, which date from the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, there are large panels of mosaic covering tops and sides of boxes. It took incredible skill to cover such large areas without any shakes or wavering of the pattern. The corners and joins on these boxes are impeccably matched.

The makers (reputed to be Persian) of Sadeli mosaic made in the first two decades of the 19th century displayed a total understanding of the qualities of the different materials they used. They combined substances, which can expand and contract according to atmospheric conditions with others, which are hard and unyielding. The result was a sharp definition of the lines and patterns, which made up the whole design.

On the early boxes the designs look deceptively simple. The fact is, they emerged from a culture, which had mastered geometry and understood how to generate a pattern from a set number of points. The patterns are so harmoniously combined that their incredible complexity is not immediately apparent.

The earliest Sadeli boxes are of simple rectangular shapes. The combination of the diverse patterns is a triumph of artistic judgment, impeccable workmanship and deep respect for the material in hand. The boxes have an opulence emanating from the richness of the materials, yet the total control of these materials and the cerebral nature of the overall designs give them a restrained dignity. These early Sadeli boxes are now very rare indeed.

The carved Anglo Indian boxes fall into two very distinctive categories:

1. Early 19th century sandalwood boxes which were finely carved with repetitive floral and bird motifs and

2. Later 19th and 20th century wooden boxes much more crudely carved with or without late period Sadeli mosaic.

There are of course variations in the quality of these later boxes and some of them are very striking.

Boxes from the first category are very rare. “

Link: http://hygra.com/anglo.html