Spa, Belgium, 1620-1670

Pair of bellows, with brass or bronze nozzle, walnut boards and leather wind chest.

The front board is decorated with brass stringing, bone and with mother-of-pearl inlay engraved with birds, insects and flowers, and with four octagonal mother-of-pearl plaques depicting the four evangelists. These are arranged in a cruciform pattern round a central roundel (bone?) depicting the Agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Above the nozzle is an oval mother of pear plaque, depicting King David, seated and playing the harp. The back board, with a heart shaped air hole, and reverse of the front board handle are decorated with a scrolling pattern of brass stringing. The handle of the back board (front face) is inset with a bone(?) plaque engraved with scrolls, fruit and leaves, pierced with a hanging hole. There are also small areas of mother-of-pearl inlay and stringing on the sides. The turned metal nozzle is nailed to the boards, and is cut in a zig-zag round its 'neck'.

The leather parts are close-nailed to the board edges with a fringed silk(?) braid, now brown, using round-headed nails. Set between the front and back boards, within the leather 'sack' is a rigid hoop, probably metal.

Purchased in 1890 from Fratelli Mora, 35 Solferino, Milan for £3 - 18 - 0

Comparable pairs of bellows in the V&A collection are 1400-1904 (with figure of Love and the Four Elements), W.11-1930 (with figure of Plenty), and W.142-1921 (Berainesque decoration.)

Comparable bellows associated with the town of Spa survive in the Musées de la Ville d'eaux - Spa (SN12), and the Museum of the Walloon Life in Liège www.viewallonne.be - reflecting a decorative character dominated by the Principality of Liège.

1614 An Inventory of the goods and household stuff of the Earl of the Northampton (Archaeologia, vol. 42)
“A cupboard of walnuttree with a Turkie carpet, the ground redd”
“Two paire of bellowes inlaid with mother-of-pearl”
“An ebony cabinet inlaied with mother-of-pearle"
Quoted in Margaret Jourdain, English Decoration and Furniture of the Early Renaissance. (1500 - 1650). Vol. I. London, 1924, FW7 D 18

Before the advent of central heating, warmth was provided by open fires, braziers or solid-fuel stoves in the main living room of the house. To maintain a fire all day demanded a certain level of skill and a range of specialist tools. Bellows were designed to add oxygen to a smouldered fire, encouraging it to burn more fiercely. (A metal blow pipe, as used in many rural areas, served the same function.)

Within the homes of northern Europe, a substantial fireplace, usually with decoration above, (if not a set piece overmantel), was an architectural and symbolic focus. Bellows, along with fire-irons, fire-dogs and often an iron fire-back, would have been essential accessories of the hearth, and usually with some level of figurative ornament that would have caught the light and pleased the eye. While most bellows would have been plain, utilitarian items, the rarer, decorated examples have been preserved in proportionately greater numbers. The embellishment of these bellows clearly goes beyond pure functionality, with engraved mother of pearl plaques and brass inlay that would both have caught the light, and silk fringe.

The decoration of these bellows in brass inlay and engraved mother of pearl (and bone) suggests an origin in the Southern Netherlands, in the fashionable resort of Spa. From the first half of the seventeenth century to about 1800, decorative and utilitarian souvenir wares such as carved canes, boxes, brushes for clothes or the hearth, bellows were made for sale to the tourists who had come to take the water. In 1735 Karl Ludwig von Pöllnitz described the "Amusemens des eaux de Spa : ouvrage utile à ceux qui vont boire ces eaux minérales sur les lieux’ (1735).” (H.Huth, Lacquer of the West. London, 1971).

Mother-of-pearl inlaid flowers and berries (part of a more generalised romantic iconography) and larger, engraved plaques, with scrolling brass inlay such as can be seen in 226-1890, were characteristic of Spa productions in the seventeenth century, and a comparable set of bellows exists in the Spa Realities Museum in Belgium. (A brush in the V&A collections, with similar decoration (W.42-1926) probably has the same origin). Similar techniques used by Liège weapon manufactures to decorate the butts of high end guns, may have been an important source of influence. Broadly similar inlay techniques are also found in Islamic and Asian decorative arts.

Until the introduction of central heating, the fireplace was virtually the only source of warmth in a home, and therefore the focal point of the room. When resources were available, it was made from expensive materials and lavishly decorated. It was therefore appropriate that that the tongs, pokers and bellows that went with it should also be lavishly decorated, in this case with engraved mother or pearl. In 1908, this pair of bellows was bought from the Mora brothers, a prominent Milan-based firm of dealers at the time, but probably came originally from the Southern Netherlands (today Belgium), where items inlaid with engraved mother-of-pearl tulips and other flowers were a speciality.

226-1890