A small, richly decorated priest's bell from Indonesia. The bronze hand bell was used in Buddhist rituals. Such hand bells are still used by Buddhist priests, for instance in Bali, Nepal and Tibet. But they are rarely as finely made as this example. The priest's bell consists of three parts: the domed body of the bell itself, the handle and the top. Four adjacent heads form the handle. The upper part (varja) consists of four sickle-shaped protrusions around a pin. rijksmuseum.nl

Oil on canvas, 61 x 52.1 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Germany.

The work of the Austrian painter and illustrator Gustav Klimt, b. July 14, 1862, d. Feb. 6, 1918, founder of the school of painting known as the Vienna Sezession, embodies the high-keyed erotic, psychological, and aesthetic preoccupations of turn-of-the-century Vienna's dazzling intellectual world.

Love
1895 (90 Kb); Museum der Stadt Wien, Vienna
Detail of a well-dressed woman closing her eyes and abandoning herself to her first kiss. A gypsy-like man looks down on her about to kiss her.

He has been called the preeminent exponent of ART NOUVEAU. Klimt began (1883) as an artist-decorator in association with his brother and Franz Matsoh. In 1886-92, Klimt executed mural decorations for staircases at the Burgtheater and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; these confirmed Klimt's eclecticism and broadened his range of historical references. Klimt was a cofounder and the first president of the Vienna Secession, a group of modernist architects and artists who organized their own exhibition society and gave rise to the SECESSION MOVEMENT, or the Viennese version of Art Nouveau. He was also a frequent contributor to Ver Sacrum, the group's journal.
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Nine scraps of paper with sketches of faces of men with beards have been pasted into medallions. These scraps once formed part of a sheet of studies drawn by Anthony van Dyck with black ink. He used these sheets of model drawings in his studio as examples for himself and his pupils. Some of these faces were based on those kept by his own teacher, Peter Paul Rubens.    rijksmuseum.nl

As the inscription testifies, these goblets celebrate fifty years of marriage of the Utrecht regent Jan Jacob van Westreenen, Lord of Lauwendrecht and Catharina Mamochet, Lady of Hoedringen. Their golden wedding anniversary fell on 25 August 1759. The date appears in the inscription on the right goblet, the capitals in the motto 'Geluk ô eDeL paar Met 't Vyftigst huwLYK Jaar' forming a chronogram. These glass goblets may have been blown in the Southern Netherlands where a flourishing glass industry existed around Liège and Namur. But who engraved the two goblets remains unknown.