c. 1770 Micro-ivory Ring ‘Ships in Harbor’

A c. 1770-80 ring with an intricate micro-ivory harbor scene with ships and fishermen set within a crystal covered Neoclassical setting of 18k gold. This ring comes from the descendents of Count Magnus Stenbock (1665 – 1717), a Swedish fieldmarshal and Royal Councilor. According to family lore, Stenbock made this ring during his imprisonment at the Citadel of Copenhagen. During the Great Northern War, Stenbock was forced to surrender to King Frederick IV of Denmark during the siege of Tönning, and was captured as a prisoner of war. From 1713 until the end of his life, the imprisoned general—known in his lifetime as an amateur artist and ivory carver—kept busy by painting, writing, and producing works of art in ivory. A self-portrait and several objects in ivory by Stenbock, made in Danish captivity, still survive today in the Rosenborg Castle collection. A fitted ring box, custom-made during the early 20th c. and bearing the Swedish inscription “Fängelsearbete av Stenbock” (Prison Work by Stenbock) shows that the Stenbock lore has been attached to the present ring since at least the last century. However, this attribution is more lore than fact: broadly speaking, rings set with micro-ivory were not made in Europe until about 1760, well after the death of Magnus Stenbock. More likely, the present ring was acquired by the Stenbock noble family during the late 18th c; subsequent generations may have mixed and merged ancestral legends regarding the family general with the ring itself.

Parallel examples in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna (Kunstkammer 4306 & 4308), British Museum (1978,1002.622), and Historisches Musuem Basel (Inv. 2007.557) suggest the present ring was likely made by Sebastian Hess (1732-1800) or Paul Hess (1744-1798) of Vienna. Micro-Ivory carving was a highly specialized skill; finely executed examples can be attributed to only a handful of craftsmen in Germany, France, the Low Countries, and England. The brothers Sebastian and Paul Hess were well-regarded micro-ivory specialists serving royal, noble, and affluent clients throughout Europe; by 1782, their carvings were so popular that the historian Johann Georg Meusel (1743–1820) observed that Hess-made rings and bracelets were “so very popular in Vienna that only few ladies and gentlemen don’t wear them.” He further noted that “Hess makes his trees and figures through a magnifying glass piece-by-piece and then pins them with glue into the ivory bottom one after the other. The background is always blue to make the beauty of his wholly incomparable trees even more discernible.” The appearance and workmanship of the present ring’s ships are comparable to those set into a box, attributed to Hess, in the British Museum (1978,1002.1032). Another box with Hess-carved ships in harbor is in the Louvre (see Nocq & Dreyfus 1930, no. 153). The tree branches and country house are further similar to those of compositions attributed to Hess by museums. Hess-carved micro-ivory rings all feature wide-angle scenes encapsulating multiple elements, with a thickly carved solid foreground and a matte background of powdered cobalt crystals. Hess rings from the 1770s are mostly set into simple Neoclassical settings with a channeled bezel (the rope accent around the present ring was added later during the mid-19th c), so as to not visually compete with the carving itself.

The fishing rod and sail rigging of the present ring are about a hundredth of a millimeter thick. At this microscopic scale, carving via strokes or freehand are impossible; instead, craftsmen worked out details by gently knocking at a single point with specialized tools. The task is made difficult by an extreme demand for stability: the tool of a micro-ivory carver could not slip even by a hundredth of a millimeter. The highly challenging and specialized nature of this trade contributed to its relatively short duration. The discipline would largely disappear by the early 19th century.
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