Head of man.
Westwood 1876: French, 15th century.
Dalton 1909: English, 14th century.
Koechlin 1924: French, end of the 13th or early 14th century.
Leeuwenberg 1969: France (?), last quarter of the 18th century to 1st half of the 19th century.
Jones 1990: 18th or early 19th century.
Museum's Opinion 2010: English or French, 18th or 19th century.
Attribution
Master of the Agrafe Forgeries (Leeuwenberg 1969)
Reverse
Carved in the round.
Object Condition
Hole in left side, cracked, hole in underside now filled.
Comments
The top of the head is flat, with a rebate, possibly for a crown.
Provenance
Collection of Francis Douce (b. 1757, d. 1834); collection of Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick of Goodrich Court, Herefordshire (b. 1783, d. 1848). William Burges (b. 1827, d. 1881); donated to the British Museum in 1874.
Bibliography
J. O. Westwood, Fictile Ivories in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1876), no. 510 ('58.245).
O. M. Dalton, Catalogue of the Ivory Carvings of the Christian Era in the British Museum (London, 1909), no. 249, pl. XCIII.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, p. 259; II, no. 717bis.
J. Leeuwenberg, 'Early Nineteenth-Century Gothic Ivories', in Aachener Kunstblätter, 39 (1969), pp. 111-148 (pp. 136-137, fig. 41).
Fake? The Art of Deception, ed. M. Jones, exhibition catalogue, London, British Museum, 1990, no. 192.
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