Carel de Nerée tot Babberich - Rococo Vases

Carel de Nerée tot Babberich (1880–1909)

Rococo Vases (Stollwerck 5)

1904

India ink with pen and brush on paper

33.5 × 25 cm

Provenance:

De Nerée studio sale, Mak, Amsterdam, 1933; Albert Stheeman; Piccadilly Gallery/Karel Citroen; Meentwijck Collection.

Literature:

Illustrated in Sander Bink, Verfijnde Lijnen: Carel de Nerée tot Babberich, 1880–1909, Wbooks (2025), no. 169.

Exhibitions:

Piccadilly Gallery, London, 1966; Munich, 1970; Singer Museum, Laren, 1974–75; Couperus Museum, The Hague, 2014–15.

Additional information:

Around 1904, the German chocolate manufacturer Henkel & Stollwerck organized international design competitions to attract modern artistic talent. Carel de Nerée decided to participate and produced a series of designs that are now regarded as some of the most remarkable examples of his work in the applied arts.

The artist regularly worked on designs for vases, mirrors, posters, and decorative objects, but almost all of these works have been lost. The surviving Stollwerck designs therefore offer a rare glimpse into a lesser-known aspect of his artistic practice.

Although the work initially appears to be a design for a functional object, De Nerée quickly transformed the commission into something entirely his own. The graceful Rococo forms are imbued with symbolism, sensuality, and ambiguity. The boundary between decoration and eroticism completely disappears. As Joyce Roodnat later wrote:

“His ink drawings, sometimes heightened with copper paint, recall the work of British Art Nouveau artist Aubrey Beardsley. But more lascivious, more morbid. Heart-wrenching. That word does not exist, but it imposes itself here, entirely Couperus. And that one drawing is the crowning achievement. It is a design for a slender vase, based on elongated women with broad, leaking breasts. I see longing. This is a Rorschach test in which only the hypocrite fails to recognize a vagina. And the uninformed do not either. They can then look at it undisturbed.”

Carel de Nerée tot Babberich (1880–1909) ranks among the most intriguing Dutch Symbolists of his time. Well versed in literature, charismatic, and active within The Hague’s society circles, he developed a visual language strongly influenced by Aubrey Beardsley: graphically refined, Gothic in atmosphere, and imbued with a subtle sense of decadence.