# Bloempiramide > De Metaale Pot (workshop of Lambertus van Eenhoorn) - c. 1692 - c. 1700 (the Rijksmuseum's own annual report caption gives 'ca. 1695' as a working midpoint) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/de-metaale-pot/bloempiramide-rijksmuseum-bk-2004-4/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-09 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** De Metaale Pot (workshop of Lambertus van Eenhoorn) - **Date:** c. 1692 - c. 1700 (the Rijksmuseum's own annual report caption gives 'ca. 1695' as a working midpoint) - **Medium:** Faience (tin-glazed earthenware), painted in cobalt blue under the glaze - **Dimensions:** Height 156 cm; width 38 cm; depth 38 cm; weight 29 kg. Figures given identically for both BK-2004-4-A and BK-2004-4-B in the Rijksmuseum's own object records, consistent with a matched pair. - **Object type:** Ceramic - **Period:** Dutch, late seventeenth century (the court style of William III and Mary II) - **Current location:** Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A pair of Delft faience flower pyramids, 156 centimetres tall and built from eleven stackable segments each, made around 1692-1700 and attributed - on stylistic grounds, since no maker's mark survives on this pair - to the De Metaale Pot workshop under its owner Lambertus van Eenhoorn. They belong to a short-lived fashion for tall stacked flower vases at the court of William III and Mary II, and the Rijksmuseum had wanted a pair for its own collection for more than fifty years before finally acquiring one in 2004.The acquisition was funded jointly by the BankGiro Loterij, the Vereniging Rembrandt, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, the Loudon family and the Rijksmuseum Fonds, but the museum's own annual report names no seller and discloses no price - and a widely repeated online claim about the dealer turns out, on checking the museum's own report directly, to describe an unrelated gift of a different object that same year. Four of the eleven segments in one of the two vases were not made in the 1690s at all: they are 2003-2004 reconstructions by the historic Tichelaar pottery of Makkum, disclosed plainly in the museum's own segment-by-segment catalogue records rather than folded silently into the object's original date.What is missing from the record - the seller, the price, and three centuries of ownership between manufacture and 2004 - is missing from the Rijksmuseum's own published account as well, not from a shortfall in this research; it is recorded here as an honest gap rather than smoothed over. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1692-c. 1700** De Metaale Pot workshop, Delft, under the ownership of Lambertus van Eenhoorn `[documented]` (manufacture) Dating and workshop location are given by the Rijksmuseum's own cataloguing. The specific attribution to De Metaale Pot and to Van Eenhoorn as owner is stylistic rather than mark-based; the museum itself uses the qualifier 'attributed to' for both. - **c. 1700-2004** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner is documented for roughly three centuries. By the time the pair reached the Rijksmuseum, both vases were missing entire segments, requiring later reconstruction; nothing in the sources consulted establishes where the vases spent this period or how they came to be incomplete. - **2003-2004** Koninklijke Tichelaar, Makkum (restorer, not owner) `[documented]` (restoration) Four segments - BK-2004-4-B-1, B-7, B-9 and B-10 - were newly made by the historic Tichelaar pottery of Makkum in 2003-2004, replacing lost or unusable originals, evidently in the course of preparing the pair for accession and display. Individually dated and credited in the Rijksmuseum's own object records for each segment. - **2004-present** Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam `[documented]` (acquisition) Purchased in 2004, funded jointly by the BankGiro Loterij, the Vereniging Rembrandt (aided by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds), the Loudon family and the Rijksmuseum Fonds, per the museum's own 2004 annual report and current object records. Seller and price not disclosed in any source consulted. First presented to the public in the Philipsvleugel in 2004; currently on display in gallery 2.22. ## Open questions - From whom, and through what dealer or intermediary, did the Rijksmuseum actually buy this pair in 2004? No seller is named in the museum's own annual report or in any other source consulted; a widely repeated online claim that the seller was Kunsthandel Salomon Stodel Antiquites conflates the flower pyramids with an unrelated gift the same dealer made to the museum that year (BK-2004-2, a Delft tile tableau). - What price did the Rijksmuseum pay in 2004? Not disclosed in the annual report or elsewhere. - Where were these two vases, or their surviving 17th-century segments, between manufacture c. 1692-1700 and their appearance in the 2004 acquisition? No owner is documented for roughly three centuries, and it is not established whether they were ever part of a princely Dutch or English collection such as Honselaarsdijk, or spent that time in later private hands. - Is the 'Loudon family' credited among the funders a distinct benefactor family, or connected to the 19th-century collector John F. Loudon, whose separate Delftware collection also entered the Rijksmuseum? No source found states the connection explicitly, and no source documents the Loudon family as a prior owner of this specific pair. - What, precisely, did the four reconstructed segments (B-1, B-7, B-9, B-10) look like or consist of before Tichelaar Makkum's 2003-2004 work - were they missing outright, fragmentary, or too damaged to display? J.D. van Dam's 2008 technical article in the Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum appears to be the primary account of this work, but this researcher could not obtain its full text. - Does any documentary or archival record - a factory ledger, a contemporary inventory, a later sale catalogue - independently confirm the attribution to De Metaale Pot and Lambertus van Eenhoorn, given that no maker's mark survives on this pair? ## Sources - [1] Rijksmuseum, object record for 'Flower pyramid', BK-2004-4-A. - [2] Rijksmuseum, object record for 'Flower pyramid', BK-2004-4-B. - [3] Rijksmuseum, object record for BK-2004-4-B-1, the crowning bust, dated to its 2003-2004 reconstruction by Koninklijke Tichelaar, Makkum. - [4] Rijksmuseum, object record for BK-2004-4-B-7, a reservoir segment dated to its 2003-2004 reconstruction by Koninklijke Tichelaar, Makkum. - [5] Rijksmuseum, object record for BK-2004-4-B-9, a reservoir segment dated to its 2003-2004 reconstruction by Koninklijke Tichelaar, Makkum. - [6] Rijksmuseum, object record for BK-2004-4-B-10, a reservoir segment dated to its 2003-2004 reconstruction by Koninklijke Tichelaar, Makkum. - [7] Rijksmuseum, Jaarverslag 2004 (annual report), 'Twee vorstelijke bloempiramides', pp. 56-59, and the formal acquisitions list, p. 72, naming BK-2004-4 and its funders and, on the same page, Kunsthandel Salomon Stodel Antiquites' separate gift of BK-2004-2. Primary source, fetched and read in full. - [8] Rijksmuseum, podcast 'In het Rijks', episode 'Bloempiramides', Janine Abbring interviewing Femke Diercks, head of applied arts, published 1 December 2020. - [9] J.D. van Dam, 'Technische problemen bij de reconstructie van enkele delen van een bloempiramide', Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 56 (2008), pp. 58-59. Bibliographic record located via the journal's JSTOR issue index; full text not accessible to this researcher - flagged in notes_for_editor for follow-up. - [10] Rijksmuseum, object record for BK-KOG-1723, 'Bloempiramide', anonymous, c. 1700, on loan from the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap since 1936. - [11] Rijksmuseum, object record for BK-14852-A, 'Pair of flower pyramids', De Metaale Pot under Lambertus van Eenhoorn, c. 1710, marked LVE. - [12] TEFAF, 'A Wondrous Pyramidal Flower Vase by Adrianus Kocx'. - [13] Christopher Stevens for Aronson Antiquairs of Amsterdam, 'A Passion and a Fashion: Queen Mary II's Delftware at Hampton Court Palace'. - [14] Aronson Antiquairs of Amsterdam, 'De Metaale Pot Factory'. - [15] Aronson Antiquairs of Amsterdam, 'Lambertus van Eenhoorn'. - [16] Delftsaardewerk.nl, mark record for 'LVE' (Lambertus van Eenhoorn, owner of De Metaale Pot, 1691-1724). - [17] Wikipedia, 'Tulip vase', for the general point that the stacked construction of large flower pyramids was a structural response to the limits of firing a single large tin-glazed vessel intact c. 1700. Tertiary source; flagged for replacement with a scholarly ceramics-history account of Delft firing technique. - [18] Wikimedia Commons, extmetadata for File:Bloempiramide, BK-2004-4-A.jpg and sibling files (BK-2004-4-B, BK-2004-4-B-1, BK-2004-4-B-10, BK-KOG-1723), each independently checked: LicenseShortName 'CC0', Artist/credit 'Rijksmuseum'. - [19] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'Obelisk', attributed to Lambertus van Eenhoorn, accession 50.211.35. The museum's own object page could not be fetched directly (repeated rate-limit errors); details are drawn from a corroborating third-party index of the Met's own listing and should be re-verified against metmuseum.org directly before this related work is relied on for exact wording. - [20] Delftsaardewerk.nl, object record for BK-2004-4-B, 'bloempiramide, onderdeel van een paar'. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. 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