A Pair Of ‘Sorrento’ Stained Olive and Fruit Wood Pictures By Michele Grandville (Italian, 1821-1893).
Depicting ‘Roman Tarantella Dancers’ and ‘A Pompeian Harp Recital’, each with a Renaissance style foliate scrolled frame of marquetry penwork, tinted woods and geometric straw mosaic.
The ‘Tarantella Dancers’ signed ‘M Grandville’.
Italy, Circa 1860.
Marquetry production in the Sorrento region of Naples, Southern Italy, has been ongoing since the high Middle Ages. Production from Sorrento can be distinguished from other marquetry centres, such as Tuscany, by the use of olive wood which is abundant in the region.
In 1848 Michele Grandville, a Frenchman, established a workshop with Luigi Gargiulo, from Rome, making fine wood and straw marquetry boxes, furniture and pictures. By 1862 Grandville is recorded to have a shop in Sorrento ‘near the Tasso hotel’ (A Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy, London, 1862, p. 259). At the 1862 International Exhibition in London ‘Beautiful marquetry and Sorrentowork is exhibited by Michele Grandville, of Sorrento’ is recorded (The Technologist, London, 1862, p. 270).
Michele Grandville appears to have specialised in pictorial decoration as opposed to furniture construction. He was known to have perfected painting in a marquetry mosaic on olive wood in two or more colours, reproducing scenes of daily Neapolitan life, drawn from contemporary engravings of Gaetano Dura, and Pompeian subjects (Nuova Antologia di Lettere, Scienze ed Arti, Volume CXLVII, July-August 1910, Rome, p. 412).
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