How much would you pay for a couple of garden gnomes? If you were a bidder at UK firm Trevanion Auctioneers & Valuers in mid-October, the answer is $642. But they weren’t just any old gnomes… from the early 20th century, they were described as being in the manner of Johann Maresch, who was already well-known for his lifelike ceramics before he joined Adolf Baehr in 1841 in his ceramic and garden gnome-making factory in Austro-Hungary.
The first garden gnomes to appear in the UK were shipped there from Germany in 1847 by Sir Charles Isham, who displayed 21 of them in his rockery and inadvertently caused something of a sensation. In the 1870s, when proponents of the Romantic Movement were convinced that fairies and gnomes really existed, thousands of people visited the gardens at Lamport Hall (Isham’s estate). Not everyone loved the little people, however; Sir Charles’s own daughters thought them unfit decoration for an aristocratic estate and when he died in 1903 they took all of them away except for one, who was hidden in the undergrowth and only rediscovered in the late 1940s by Sir Gyles Isham. ‘Lampy’, as he is now known, became something of a gnome ambassador, travelling to Singapore, Australia and New Zealand and appearing at the Chelsea Garden show.
The earthenware pair shown here measure 69cm and 72cm high and both are modelled sitting on a naturalistic log. Back in 2007, Christie’s London sold a single signed and stamped Johann Maresch gnome for $1460.
