Daum Nancy "Bat" Vase
Regular price
$14,500
This exquisite orange and black Chauve-Souris (“Bat”) vase by Daum Frères transforms its unusual form into part of its imagery. The shouldered neck has been pinched and hot-drawn into five radiating points, giving the vessel the silhouette of a black henbane, a plant that caused hallucination and death that was used since antiquity. Across the body, a flight of bats appears in acid-etched cameo decoration—a technique in which surrounding layers of glass are etched away to leave the design in relief—with details further refined by wheel carving. The foot is encircled by a Gothic-inspired architectural frieze of alternating trefoil and ogee (S-curved) arches, while cusped ornament rises around the base of the body. The combination of nocturnal bats and Gothic architecture belongs to a recurring strand within Daum’s oeuvre, in which the natural world takes on a mysterious, fantastical character.
Item #: YG-22074
Artist: Daum Nancy
Country: France
Circa: 1900
Dimensions: 10.75" height, 5.5" diameter.
Materials: Glass
Signed: “Daum Nancy: and marked with the Croix de Lorraine
Item #: YG-22074
Artist: Daum Nancy
Country: France
Circa: 1900
Dimensions: 10.75" height, 5.5" diameter.
Materials: Glass
Signed: “Daum Nancy: and marked with the Croix de Lorraine
The vase draws upon the darker associations that surrounded bats and Gothic architecture in nineteenth-century European culture. Because bats commonly roosted in church towers, folklore associated them with witches and supernatural forces; the expression “bats in the belfry” subsequently emerged as an idiom for eccentricity or madness. Daum’s pairing of bats with Gothic architectural motifs therefore evokes the Romantic fascination with ruined churches and forgotten monuments. Artists and writers such as Caspar David Friedrich and Nancy-born Victor Hugo transformed the Gothic ruin into a meditation on memory, and loss. Friedrich repeatedly used ruined ecclesiastical architecture to contemplate religious reformation, while Hugo—whose 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris helped galvanize interest in the preservation of medieval architecture—treated endangered Gothic monuments as repositories of collective memory. Against this cultural background, Daum’s bats, pointed arches, and cusped tracery transform the vase into a miniature nocturnal Gothic landscape.
The vase draws upon the darker associations that surrounded bats and Gothic architecture in nineteenth-century European culture. Because bats commonly roosted in church towers, folklore associated them with witches and supernatural forces; the expression “bats in the belfry” subsequently emerged as an idiom for eccentricity or madness. Daum’s pairing of bats with Gothic architectural motifs therefore evokes the Romantic fascination with ruined churches and forgotten monuments. Artists and writers such as Caspar David Friedrich and Nancy-born Victor Hugo transformed the Gothic ruin into a meditation on memory, and loss. Friedrich repeatedly used ruined ecclesiastical architecture to contemplate religious reformation, while Hugo—whose 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris helped galvanize interest in the preservation of medieval architecture—treated endangered Gothic monuments as repositories of collective memory. Against this cultural background, Daum’s bats, pointed arches, and cusped tracery transform the vase into a miniature nocturnal Gothic landscape.
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