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French Taste-Vin
Pipette
This is an
example of the other form of taste-vin.
This is known as a taste-vin
pipette. It is essentially a tube used to syphon wine through the bung
hole of a barrel so that the wine can be sampled and analyzed while it is
still in the barrel. They are also called a sonde à vin or wine
probe. The handle has a wonderful patina, the glass tube is in mint
condition. It measures 19.75 inches long and .8125 inches wide without the
handle, 3.5 inches wide with the handle.
French Glass
Bondé or Wine Barrel Stopper
The making of wine requires all
sorts of interesting paraphenalia. This is not a paperweight...it's a
glass stopper known as a bondé used to plug a hole drilled into the top of
a wine barrel. When the time came for testing and analysis, the bondé...or
bung, as it is known in English...is removed and the taste-vin pipette is
used to remove some of the wine from the barrel.
It measures 4.125 inches high, 2
inch diameter at the top, and 1.5 inch diameter at the base. The lower
portion was lightly ground to form a perfect fit into the hole in the
barrel, the large interior bubble is surrounded by several bubbles that
are much smaller. The end of the base has one small
chip and one teeny chip.
Vintage Photograph of Wine-Tasting
The wine baskets are empty and the
glasses are full, so perhaps this colorful group of men are celebrating
the sale of the grapes just gathered from the vineyard.
 The harvesting of grapes is known as a vendange and, going by the
clothing, it looks as if the man in the foreground wearing a white suit
and sitting with the dog and the man in the black hat in the left
background didn't do any of the picking. That was probably left to the
others.
The image is a vintage albumen
print, so called because eggs whites or albumen are used in the process of
making the photographic image, and dates from circa 1890.
The sight size of the photograph
is 6.5 inches high by 4.625 inches wide. It is in its original 10.5 inch by
8.25 inch wood frame.
Vintage Studio Lightbulb
I'm ready for my close-up, Mr.
DeMille.
This is actually a vintage lightbulb
used for location and studio lighting, but
displayed as it is, it would be a fabulously decorative item for a modern
industrial décor. It has great sculptural appeal!
English, it is marked on the
top as shown...GEC for General Electric Company perhaps?
The bulb alone measures 10.5
inches high and 6 inches wide; when set on the stand, the display measures
14.5625 inches high and 13 inches deep.
Catteau Mystery Vase
This is a great vase...but it's sort
of a mystery. It appears to an early piece of Belgian art pottery and it
is signed Catteau on the base; several experts in the field of
twentieth-century ceramics are willing to attest to an attribution to
Charles Catteau, but documentation of Catteau's early work for Boch Frères
is sorely lacking, and thus, for me, it remains sort of a mystery.
Charles Catteau (1880-1966) was a French artist and designer. He created
designs to be used on ceramics for the Sèvres and Rambervillers factories
in France and the Nymphenburg pottery in Germany, but is best known for
his work in Saint Vaast-La Louvière (Belgium) for the firm known as Boch
Frères. He began his career at Boch Frères in early 1907 and moved up the
corporate ladder very quickly...winning a gold medal at salons as early as
1910.
But very little is known of his work during this part of his tenure with
Boch Frères...the area was hard hit during World War I...and just about
all remaining documentation deals with the later Art Déco period
beginning in the 1920s. (He was to oversee the creation of more than 2000
patterns before retiring from Boch Frères in 1950).
So whether it is a Charles Catteau piece or not remains a mystery.
What is not a mystery is that it is a wonderful piece of art pottery.
The glaze has been applied to the earthenware body so that it is raised to
the touch...giving the vase great tactile as well as visual appeal.
The floral design seems to bridge the lines of Art Nouveau and Art
Déco...not quite the formal sinuous motifs Catteau created for the Sèvres
factory circa 1900 and not yet the angular patterns of those he produced
at Boch Frères circa 1925.
It measures 6.675 inches high, 5 inches wide, and is in mint condition.
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