Passed
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Description
35" (90 cm.) A stylized figure of an artist in the Van Gogh manner is perched on the top rung of a ladder-back chair,holding a sketch pencil in his right hand and a clothbound sketchbook in his left hand. He has a composition head and hands,pale green paperweight eyes,wiry black hair,moustache and goatee,and articulated eyelids and lower lip. His rich costume confirms that he is no starving artist,featuring a patterned yellow cotton shirt with oversized purple silk necktie,black velvet silk-lined jacket with designs of a painter's palette on one lapel and a set of paint brushes on the other,trousers with a plaid multi-colored pattern,striped socks and brown leather shoes. Over his left shoulder is a low-slung,velvet-covered quiver decorated with playing cards and holding his paint brushes and pencils. Movements and Music. The Artist blinks his eyes alternately in humorous fashion,and he turns and nods to look down at his work while drawing his pencil to the sketchbook and moving his lower lip as if mumbling. All the while,his shoulders shrug,but alternately from each other,and he draws his right leg up as if to cross the other. After some sketching,his left arm swings out to present his finished work,a portrait of a gentleman monkey. But,suddenly,the page turns as though from a wind gust,to reveal the same monkey portrait with its jaw wagging and its hat dancing on its head. The highly animated scene is amplified by the Artist's brush quiver rising and falling each time he shrugs his shoulder. The highly complex mechanism consists of two sets of cams,five larger and three smaller,rotating at different speeds on separate shafts and causing the illusion of some eleven movements to take place. Steel linkages pass from the mechanism in the chair seat,up the back of the chair and into the Artist's body. A musical movement plays two tunes. There are 8 cams and 11 movements. Michel Bertrand,Switzerland,1982,after a Gustav Vichy piece with many original Vichy parts. The automaton was acquired from Bertrand by Bunny and Jerry Steinbaum in 1982 and has remained in their possession until this time. Another example is in the Guinness Collection at the Morris Museum,and it is believed that only a very few of this very appealing and complicated model were ever made.