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Taotie monster vase Taotie monster vase
© Fitzwilliam Museum

Taotie monster vase

Unknown Artist

Art Funded
2006
Presented by
Mollie Lees through The Art Fund
Chinese bronze vase cast and decorated with a band of taotie monster faces in cloisonné enamel on the neck and belly.

The design is a late 19th- or early 20th-century copy of an ancient bronze ritual vessel, made to satisfy the antique collecting craze of the time.

Provenance

Collection of Mrs Mollie Lees.

Bronze & cloissoné enamel

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Renoir's La Place Clichy presents a charming and apparently spontaneous impression of Parisian life. It is easy to see from this picture why one commentator described the artist as 'the true painter of young women, the bloom of whose skin, velvet flesh, darting eye, and elegant finery, he renders with sunlit gaiety.'

The 14th-century Macclesfield Psalter contains delightfully surreal marginal illustrations, including a dog dressed as a bishop, a rabbit riding a hound, and a series of grotesque figures with faces in their bottoms and legs emerging from their shoulders.

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