Baroque shape with two scroll handles featuring lion masks, domed foot. Decorated with a polychrome Swedish coat of arms acolle of the Bielke family to one side, the other side with a painted blue motif featuring putti playing with spears and sords in a garden with large flowers. The base with chinoiserie birds and foliage. Height c. 57, length between handles c. 60 cm. Inner diameter c. 42 cm.
Restored.
One of a suite of urns likely commissioned by Count Thure Gabriel Bielke (1684-1763), possibly in connection with the grand service of arms featuring his and his wife Charlotta Christina Piper's coat of arms, married in 1715 (see the auction's catalogue number 456). He had Thureholm in Södermanland rebuilt according to designs by Carl Hårleman and established a large and lavish garden there. In Bielke's estate inventory from 1763, "At the Gardener's" lists 8 urns with "the Bielke coat of arms."
Swedish Castles and Manors: Södermanland, Stockholm 1908, compare the urn from the same suite at Thureholm, illustrated on page 421. Compare another urn from the same suite sold from Thureholm at Bukowskis' autumn auction in 1986, A446, cat. no. 1149.