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Piano

  • Designer / Maker

    Manufactured by John Bettridge & Co.,

    successor to Jennens & Bettridge

     

  • Marked

    ‘MANUFACTURED / BY /J. BETTRIDGE & CO / BIRMINGHAM. / TO THE ORDER OF G.S. MEASON [tie], ESQR / ST MARGARET’S ISLEWORTH / NEAR LONDON.’ (on oval plaque inside lid) and ‘ETHERINGTON’S RICHMOND'(on the action).

  • Provenance

    George  Samuel  Measom,  F.R.G.S., J.P. (b.  1818); […]; Christie’s (Edinburgh),

    22 May 1996, lot 217; private collection.

  • Exhibited

    Paris Exposition Universelle, 1867

  • Collection

    Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

  • Literature

    Reports of Artisans … Paris Universal Exhibition 1867, London, 1868, p.104

    The Illustrated Catalogue Of The Universal Exhibition Published With The Art Journal, London, 1868, p. 50

    Catherine Futter and Jason Busch, eds., Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939, New York, 2012, no. 49

  • Notes

    Jennens & Bettridge is arguably the most celebrated of the many nineteenth-century firms manufacturing papier-mâché in the biggest centres of production, Birmingham and Wolverhampton. The firm worked on both a large and small scale, the present piano representing one of their more ambitious achievements. A similarly designed case was exhibited in London at the Great Exhibition, 1851 (see Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, II, London, 1854, pl. XVI). The decoration on the present case, with its ‘Jacobethan’ strap-work and reverse-decorated glass panels, appears more elaborate than the earlier version.

    George Measom was chairman of Heston, Hounslow and Isleworth Local Board, and a member of several learned societies. He lived at St. Margaret’s Lodge, Twickenham and Arklow House, Ramsgate, Kent (Kelly’s Handbook of the Titled, Landed, and Official Classes 1880).

    There is a piano stool, probably en suite.