An important maiolica basin from Urbino for the Clark

6/4/26 - Acquisition - Williamstown, Clark Art Institute (Massachusetts) - We have already written it: always remarkable, the stand of European ceramics occupied at TEFAF by Camille Leprince never fails to attract the interest of numerous European and international institutions. Like the Detroit Institute of Arts (see the news item of 7/3/26), the Clark Art Institute, a regular at the fair (see most recently the news item of 2/1/26), did not make a mistake and acquired, a few months after the 2025 edition, a large maiolica basin (ill. 1 and 2), a masterpiece from the Urbino workshops, attributed to the workshop of Orazio Fontana or his nephew Flaminio Fontana. As a flagship piece of the selection presented, it was the subject of a very complete catalogue, written by Greta Kaucher, from which we derive most of our information.

The art historian notably traced the tumultuous history of the object in the twentieth century. Discovered at the end of the Second World War by the Monuments Men in a salt mine in Bohemia or Austria, along with a large part of the collection of the Amsterdam banker Fritz Mannheimer, the basin, previously owned by the banker Eugen Gutmann, was among the countless works of art sold to the Nazis in the 1940s, considered as looted property to be returned to their former owners. Although the basin was indeed received at the central collection point in Munich in February 1946 and immediately sent back to Amsterdam, it was not returned to Fritz Mannheimer’s widow, Marie Annette Reiss, but to the Dutch state. Indeed, upon his premature death in 1939, the banker was no longer the owner of his collection, which had been…