Introducing Miss Gray and the Nautilus Shell

We are excited to welcome our good friend Laura Gray to the Shop as a regular contributor to the Journal. Laura is an assistant curator at a museum in the North West of England and works with both fine and decorative art collections. She is also a student at Liverpool School of Art where she is researching innovative curatorial practice, both historic and contemporary, in relation to decorative art collections. As an avid visitor to weird and wonderful places all over Europe, Laura is a source of wonderful references and ideas. She is the perfect candidate to write a monthly article for the Journal in which she will select an object from the shop and discuss it within a wider context. Knowing Laura, this could include anything from the French Revolution, her latest obsession, to the oldest museum in Holland!

Below is Laura’s inaugural article, we hope you enjoy it.

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The Nautilus Shell
by Laura Gray

Stephanie Simek’s fascination with shells places her in a family tree of collectors, artists and patrons who have loved the iridescent beauty and satisfying geometry of shells, and perhaps even the idea of their concealed miraculous powers.

This necklace, with its allusions to the senses, to the transitory, to sensuality is a wearable still life. The Dutch painters of the seventeenth century cultivated this genre and the composition of their paintings is made up of only a few objects which are very carefully selected and highly prized, such as a cup made out of a shell mounted in wonderfully wrought silver or gold.

Porringer and Nautilus Cup, oil painting by Pieter van Roestraten c. 1660 (Victoria & Albert Museum)

The first arrival into Western Europe of minerals, ivories, ostrich eggs, nautilus shells, and other strange things staggered the imaginations of artists and collectors. Nautilus shells had been revered since antiquity for their beauty, which was now enhanced by goldsmiths who fashioned for these shells stunning and ostentatious mounts.

Nautilus Cup, Silver-gilt embossed and chased, shell, enamel. 16th Century (Victoria & Albert Museum)

The craze for these intriguing objects spread around the royal courts of Europe. They often found a home in the Wunderkammer (the cabinet of curiosity, a privately owned predecessor to the modern day museum) where natural and manmade objects were juxtaposed with scientific instruments, not unlike the shell and silver funnel that hang from Stephanie Simek’s Powder Shell Necklace.

The Powder Shell Necklace calls to mind the gentle and subtle light that can be seen in some Dutch still life painting. Light envelopes the objects as it reveals them to the viewer, reflections and glints are cast by different materials. And like the goldsmith decorating the already sublime nautilus shell, producing an integration of artists expression, exquisite proportions and splendid craftsmanship, Stephanie Simek fills the dainty shell on her necklace with silver dust through a miniature silver funnel.