Beschreibung:

Her Majesty’s Vase – A Victorian Royal presentation Warwick vase horse racing trophy, London 1845 by John Samuel Hunt After the antique, on square foot and with spreading circular stem, the body cast and chased with a band of acanthus foliage and with lion's pelt and bacchic masks, applied below the egg-and-dart rim with trailing vines, with twin dual interlaced vine handles. The ebonised wooden plinth applied with two rectangular plaques and two vacant laurel wreath cartouches. One of the rectangular plaques finely engraved with the Royal Coat of Arms, the opposing plaque engraved with a presentation inscription reading “Plymouth, Devonport and Cornwall Races 1845, the gift of her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria, Augustus Coryton Esqr, W. R. Fortescue Esqr, Stewards. Each plaque detachable to the underside with loop nuts. Fully marked to the side and to each plaque, the twelve original wing nuts with lion passant only. Stamped to the side of square foot HUNT & ROSKELL LATE STORR & MORTIMER 2225. Height (including plinth) – 41.8 cm / 16.5 inches Weight – 4316 grams / 138.476 ozt “Her Majesty’s Vase, value 100gs., for three-year-old and upwards – Heats, about two miles, starting at the T.Y.C. Starting-post, once round, to the Grand Stand Winning-post. Sir J.B. Mill’s br. f. Giantess, by Leviathan out of Virginia, 3 yrs 8st (A. Day) 2 / 1 / 1 Mr R.J Southby’s b. m. Europa (h.-b), 5 yrs, 9st. 12 lb 1 / 2 /2 Mr J. King’s ch. C. by Glaucus out of Dick’s Dam, 3 yrs, 8 st. 4lb. 3 dr.” Provenance: Her Majesty Queen Victoria Sir John Barker Mill, 1st Baronet (4 December 1803 – 20 February 1860), Thence by Descent Born John Barker in accordance to the last will and testament of his maternal uncle Sir Charles Mill, he took the additional name of Mill by Royal Licence on 8 May 1835. The Reverend John Barker Mill was created a Baronet 'of Mottisfont in the County of Southampton' on 16 March 1836. Barker-Mill died at Mottisfont Abbey, Hampshire in 1860. The Warwick Vase, a colossal marble vase measuring nearly six feet high, dates from the 2nd century A.D. It was found in fragments in 1770 at the bottom of a lake at Hadrian's Villa near Rome by a group of Englishmen and was acquired by Sir William Hamilton at the time Ambassador to Naples. Hamilton in tum sold it, now restored, to his kinsman, Charles (Greville), 2nd Earl of Warwick, who set it up in the grounds of Warwick Castle. The vase had been engraved by Piranesi in 1778, and these prints provided the inspiration for versions of the vase in silver and silver-gilt during the Regency period. Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, the royal goldsmiths appear to have supplied most of the Warwick Vases, the most notable being the set of twelve commissioned by the Prince Regent and struck with the marked for Paul Storr now at Windsor Castle. The Duke of York, second son of George III, owned a set of four which were included in the sale of his silver at Christie's in 1827 Of his marble vase, the Earl of Warwick wrote “I built a noble greenhouse, and ... placed in it a Vase, considered as the finest remains of Grecian art extant for size and beauty." The vase, however, did have one critic. The Hon. John Byng, later 5th Viscount Torrington and author of a series of fascinating and at times irascible journals of his rides through England, spoke thus of the Roman monument when describing his visit to Warwick Castle: "The upper court is environed by old walls and turrets, o'erhung with ivy; the portcullis down; and nothing to disgrace the taste of antiquity, but a vulgar overgrown Roman basin in the center of the court; which I would toss into the center of the river, or give to the church for a font!" (C. Bruyn Andrews, ed. The Torrington Diaries, a selection from the tours of the Hon. John Byng between the years 1781 and 1794, London, 1954, p. 102).