Figurine of a Beggar

In 1914, George Gough Booth kept this figurine on display in his office at Cranbrook House. It is a romantic depiction of a beggar, a bearded man in a tattered coat and turban, holding out an open bag to ask for charity. The turban may be intended as an ethnic signifier, to suggest that the figure is an itinerant Ottoman Muslim or Jew. Members of both religions were stereotypically portrayed with turbans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, Orientalist trends in fashion at the turn of the eighteenth century made turbans a popular accessory for European men and women of all backgrounds; as many men shaved their heads and wore wigs outside the house, turbans were popularly worn at home, or at informal occassions.

The figurine is marked on its base with the crowned letter N associated with the famed Capodimonte porcelain factory, founded in Naples in 1743. The original products of the Capodimonte factory, which operated in Naples until 1759, were highly prized by European collectors for the artistry shown by the factory’s sculptors and painters. The factory was relocated to Madrid in 1759, where porcelain continued to be made under the Capodimonte name until the nineteenth century. Over the following hundred years, many imitators across Europe made use of the name and marks associated with Capodimonte to market their wares.

This figurine is almost certainly from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, as in 1914 it was valued at a mere eight dollars in the Cranbrook House inventory. Sentimental depictions of peasants and mendicants like this figurine hark back to the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for romanticized visions of poverty, elsewhere epitomized in the rural scenes painted by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Mariam Hale
2023-2025 Collections Fellow
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
September 2024