World’d greatest collection of chess sets

Checkmate: World’s greatest collection of chess sets on display at DIA
By Jay M. Grossman
ECCENTRIC STAFF WRITER
• December 21, 2008

An epic struggle of good over evil echoes throughout the home of George and Vivian Dean.

The battlefield takes form in the shape of a chess set. The armies are cast in silver and bronze, porcelain and marble.

The Bloomfield Township couple owns one of the most extensive collections of antique chess sets in the world. Thirty of those sets will be on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the exhibition: Master Pieces: Chess Sets from the Dr. George and Vivian Dean Collection.

Their oldest set dates back almost 500 years to the 16th century. Their collection also boasts a Faberge set worth millions of dollars and another set that’s linked to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Each board is unique. Each one has its own story to tell.

“Napoleon was an avid chess player,” George Dean said. “He wasn’t a great player, but he loved to play chess.”

The set comes from the Cafe de la Regence in Paris, known as the chess center of the world in the early 19th century.

“All the great players would gather at that place and there was a table where Napoleon would play against various individuals.

“And there was a plaque overriding the table that said, ‘Here Napoleon played chess.’ That chess set sat there through the 19th century and it is now part of our collection.”

His collection includes a Civil War set that was purchased in Russia at a museum in St. Petersburg. The Union king is Abraham Lincoln and the queen is Ulysses S. Grant. The Confederate king is Jefferson Davis and the queen is Robert E. Lee.

FINGERS AND THUMBS

A chess set made of silver created by Salvador Dali in 1964 is certainly the most unique in the Dean collection.

Dali made the set in homage to Marcel Duchamp, the leader of the Dadaist movement and an avid chess player. All the pieces except for the rooks and the two queens were modeled after Dali’s fingers.

“He took his fingers and made casts of his fingers and thumbs,” Dean said. “The king was his middle finger crowned with a tooth that he had lost when he was 3 years old. He used his wife’s index finger and made her the queen.

“His thumbs were the knights and the castles were modeled after salt shakers from the Hotel Saint Regis in New York City.”

The Faberge set was purchased in 1977 from a London art collector. It is easily the rarest set in the Dean collection.

The 1905 set was a gift from the Russian royal family to Aleksei Nikolaevich Kuropatkin, a famous general who led the Czarist forces into Manchuria to battle Japan.

Russia lost.

“He came back very depressed from losing the war, and in order to buoy his spirits the royal family commissioned Faberge to create the chess set,” Dean said. “And along the perimeter of the board is written, ‘To our dearly beloved Commander-In-Chief for his faithful duties in Manchuria…’ so it has a history to it, and it has a beauty and uniqueness that makes it a very important set.”

A family doctor and avid art collector, Dean began the collection with his wife in 1962.

Source: http://www.hometownlife.com