RARE Irish Arts & Crafts Celtic Brass Wall Plaque c1900 Start Price USD 285.00 Current Price USD 293.00 Time Left - Bid Count 2 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Sunday, August 24, 2008 End Time Sunday, August 31, 2008 Location West Coast of Clare See more about 'RARE Irish Arts & Crafts Celtic Brass Wall Plaque c1900' Description   RARE Irish Arts & Crafts Celtic Brass Wall Plaque c1900   Click to View Image Album  Click to View Image Album  Click to View Image Album  Magnificent Arts and Crafts Movement LARGE Brass Wall Plaque - decorated with Celtic interlacing chains on the border and four medallions engraved with mythological images. The centre medallion has a pair of mythological animals embracing  (from the Book of Lindisfarne)                   It is complete with sturdy brass hanger on reverse. Celtic Ornamentation The achievement of Irish artists of the early Christian period is prevalent in the Book of Kells. It was in Westwood’s Palaeographia Sacra Pictoria of 1845 that details from the Book of Kells were illustrated for the first time. Until then few would have been aware of the existence of a native school of religious art. The Book of Kells is the furnishing to all the bleak time-wreaked monastic ruins one will see inIreland today. It is the explanatory footnote to the hundreds of roofless ruins that are strewn in every part of the country. This illuminated manuscript of the eighth century displays an orgy of ornamentation, with human and animal figures growing into and out of arabesque, never finishing logically as they began, the natural always linked with the supernatural. The point to remember is that this book and its companions (there are four or five in Trinity Library) are the fruit of that happy Golden Age when Christianity came to Ireland. The most widespread vehicles for Celtic ornament in the mid- nineteenth century were the reproduction brooches manufactured by some Dublin jewellers. Examples like the ‘Clarendon’ brooch produced from 1849 on and the ‘Tara’ brooch produced from 1851 on by Waterhouse and Company. In the 1880’s, Celtic Ornament was to achieve a general ascendancy over the more traditional symbols of Ireland as a means of achieving a ‘national’ identity. One particular triumph over the traditional symbols occurred at the Cork Exhibition of 1883 where Richard Q.Lane of Belfast won the competition for the exhibition medal with a Celtic design. The medal included ribbon and zoomorphic interlace and its knots and spirals taken from the Tara brooch. The medal was deemed at the time to be ‘perhaps the only medal thoroughly Irish in design ever struck’. There was a general upsurge in the minor arts in Ireland in the 1880’s and 1890’s in particular woodcarving. In 1886 several art carving schools were set up in various parts of the country by the English founded ‘Home Arts and Industries Association’. Celtic ornament abounded in their products. In the early 1890’s Belfast saw a number of artists and designers working in Celtic style in the field of book illustration; illumination; damask designs and general craftwork. The most prolific was a group known as the Irish Decorative Art Association. They ‘endeavoured to carry the beautiful Celtic spirit’ into all they did, striving to bring their work ‘within the reach of every Irish homestead be it the stately palace of the peer or the lowly cottage of the labourer. They specialised in: metalwork; embroidery; embossed leatherwork and the decoration of harps, small items of furniture and wooden and ceramic Celtic bowls. The group’s slogan was ‘Celtic designs a speciality’. The revival of Celtic ornament continued unabated into the 1920’s and 1930’s by which time a large number of craftworkers were turning out various wares in the style. Embossed and stained leatherwork was a favourite. The Belleek Pottery at last responded to public taste for the style by introducing between 1922 and 1926 a series of tea and coffee sets and vases with moulded or printed Celtic designs finished in various colours. In recent years a renewed interest in Celtic ornamental art has been apparent, reflective in posters, book illustrations and leatherwork. The Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland  In 1888 the term ‘Arts and Crafts’ was coined in London with the establishment of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (ACES).  This was an organisation created with the purpose of promoting craft-made objects and it was essentially an exhibiting forum for the multitude of craft enterprises which had evolved in the 1850s-1880s period under the influence of writers such as John Ruskin and William Morris.  In Ireland the influence of these writers (Ruskin, Morris) as well as the formation of the ACES, was consolidated in 1895 when The Earl of Mayo founded the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland in Dublin . However, unlike English predecessors, Irish Arts and Crafts enterprises and workshops tended to be motivated by primarily philanthropic rather than professional figures. Throughout Ireland, from Donegal to Kerry and Cork to Dublin and Derry, hundreds of Arts and Crafts workshops were established in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, embracing every type of traditional craft practice conceivable. It involved a host of men and women who were active in what were called the minor arts embroidery, weaving, metalwork, enamelling, woodcarving, poker-work, stained glass and so on. They range from lace-makers in convents, workers in rural woodworking schools, to groups such as The Dun Emer Guild, Cuala Industries and the Tower Glass Studios.  The styles they employed varied from stylized floral to Art Nouveau as well as the more familiar Celtic idioms - fusing aspects of Ireland’s fascination with the archaeological and antiquarian past making a significant contribution to the Celtic Revival.  Many workshops were in fact formed before the 1880s and some were set up as early as the 1840s in response to the nationwide Famine.  By the dawn of the new century, however, craft enterprises began to face an uncertain future.   Although the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland was central to the Arts and Crafts movement in Ireland regional workshops and enterprises were also crucially important and none more so than those of north-east Ulster.   Measures:    19.60" diameter X 2.00" high. Condition:     Excellent. 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