coastal.tours
Vintage Holtzapffel
Le timide, 1922-1930. 800 plywood pieces, 65½ x 50 cm. Push fit, colorline cut, with some interlocking pieces. Made in England by Holtzapffel & Co., Ltd., Haymarket, London.
Here is a better picture of the puzzle I made for the November 2020 BCD weekend. Many thanks for your interest and encouragement during the assembly.
I spent some time this evening establishing the piece count, which turns out to be exactly 800. By the way, this is much easier before you start building the puzzle.
As mentioned previously, this is a colored engraving of an oil painting by Cesare-Auguste Detti (1847-1914), known as 'An elegant gathering'. It was last sold in November 2017. Detti was born in Spoleto, in Umbria, Italy, but he moved to Paris where he had a successful career, steering clear of the artistic innovations of his time. The picture in this painting is of a distinctly 18th-century scene, with apparently painstakingly researched costumes and interior decorating.
I'm sure this tableau, where one of the women shows a hesitant guest a sheet of paper, to the apparent amusement of the others, refers to some wellknown scene (perhaps from a story or a play) but I am unable to identify it. (Eugène Scribe's play Le timide, set to music by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, comes to mind, but this particular scene cannot be tied to anything in that libretto.)
The scenery, especially with the richly decorated interior, gives rise to extremely deceptive colorline cutting. For example, the eight or so vertical lines in the background separating the various panels, windows, and wall segments, each make a viable candidate for being one of the borders, until some dent or shift in the direction, many pieces down the line, forces you to adjust your hypothesis.
The only plan of attack with a complicated puzzle like this, it seems to me, is to group the pieces by color and build many parallel fragments, ultimately reducing the piece count and setting the stage for a grand resolution (which in my case came only on Monday morning).
I got this one on eBay in 2017, not from any of the regular sellers of quality vintage jigsaws, but the puzzle is complete and totally original, also with its original box and warranty card. There were in fact two excess pieces, which had me a bit worried at the end, but all is well.
This jigsaw is listed in one of the Holtzapffel brochures published on the Jigsasaurus website, as one of a series of ten 'coloured French prints'. (Another one is dajavous' Plaisirs champêtres after a Maurice Leloir painting.) I'm not sure exactly what process was followed, as the colors are much less vivid than in the original oil painting. The flyer duly adds that "the colouring is soft and does not try the eyesight". Jigsaws in this series sold for 40 shillings, which must have been an astronomical sum (about GBP 122 in today's money). I got mine for slightly more, but still a bargain, I would say.
Vintage Holtzapffel
Le timide, 1922-1930. 800 plywood pieces, 65½ x 50 cm. Push fit, colorline cut, with some interlocking pieces. Made in England by Holtzapffel & Co., Ltd., Haymarket, London.
Here is a better picture of the puzzle I made for the November 2020 BCD weekend. Many thanks for your interest and encouragement during the assembly.
I spent some time this evening establishing the piece count, which turns out to be exactly 800. By the way, this is much easier before you start building the puzzle.
As mentioned previously, this is a colored engraving of an oil painting by Cesare-Auguste Detti (1847-1914), known as 'An elegant gathering'. It was last sold in November 2017. Detti was born in Spoleto, in Umbria, Italy, but he moved to Paris where he had a successful career, steering clear of the artistic innovations of his time. The picture in this painting is of a distinctly 18th-century scene, with apparently painstakingly researched costumes and interior decorating.
I'm sure this tableau, where one of the women shows a hesitant guest a sheet of paper, to the apparent amusement of the others, refers to some wellknown scene (perhaps from a story or a play) but I am unable to identify it. (Eugène Scribe's play Le timide, set to music by Daniel-François-Esprit Auber, comes to mind, but this particular scene cannot be tied to anything in that libretto.)
The scenery, especially with the richly decorated interior, gives rise to extremely deceptive colorline cutting. For example, the eight or so vertical lines in the background separating the various panels, windows, and wall segments, each make a viable candidate for being one of the borders, until some dent or shift in the direction, many pieces down the line, forces you to adjust your hypothesis.
The only plan of attack with a complicated puzzle like this, it seems to me, is to group the pieces by color and build many parallel fragments, ultimately reducing the piece count and setting the stage for a grand resolution (which in my case came only on Monday morning).
I got this one on eBay in 2017, not from any of the regular sellers of quality vintage jigsaws, but the puzzle is complete and totally original, also with its original box and warranty card. There were in fact two excess pieces, which had me a bit worried at the end, but all is well.
This jigsaw is listed in one of the Holtzapffel brochures published on the Jigsasaurus website, as one of a series of ten 'coloured French prints'. (Another one is dajavous' Plaisirs champêtres after a Maurice Leloir painting.) I'm not sure exactly what process was followed, as the colors are much less vivid than in the original oil painting. The flyer duly adds that "the colouring is soft and does not try the eyesight". Jigsaws in this series sold for 40 shillings, which must have been an astronomical sum (about GBP 122 in today's money). I got mine for slightly more, but still a bargain, I would say.