Woman Playing the Guitar, Needle Case

Entry

This needle case in the form of a guitar-playing woman in fanciful garb belongs with another piece with a similar figure playing a guitar, but with a monkey’s head (BK-NM-7346).¹ At the foot of both figures there is a seated monkey playing a wind instrument (clarinet?). The needle cases have been carved from ivory and are partly inlaid with gold. The rest of the surface was originally partly polychromed. No related pieces are known. To begin with, the needle cases were catalogued as French, but in 1973 Leeuwenberg placed the set in the Northern Netherlands, without further elaboration.² From the middle of the seventeenth until far into the eighteenth century, a comparable genre, that of figurative cutlery handles in ivory or boxwood, was indeed popular in the Northern Netherlands (cf. BK-KOG-1529). Although the rendering is somewhat stiff, the decorative style of the present needle cases suggests they are more likely to have originated in Germany, where such applied figurative ivory carvings were also being made on a considerable scale at that time.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025