I want this crab on my wall, and I’m not above clearing a shelf for it.
It’s Steampunk Crab Alice by Peter Szucsy, and €790 for about ten hours of handwork is a fair rate when the parts are 120 to 160 years old and can’t be reordered.
The legs are knurled metal tubes with little brass gears at the joints, so they look like they could bend, and the claws are engraved brass plates with a screw through each pivot. I suspect he picked pieces that already had the shape of pincers and let them be pincers. He worked about 25 years as an Art Director and Lead Artist in games, and he says this about leaving:
I left my computer screen behind to bring my ideas to life in the physical world.
Good job, high-5! Most people who quit a screen job to make things end up with a candle shop. He ended up with a crab built from the guts of old timepieces, and the body is an engraved silver case with a round glass window and two blue stones set in it, crawling across turquoise gravel.
The frame is the trouble. The black box makes it a specimen, and I’d rather see it walking across a desk, where I could check whether the legs hold the weight of that case. Is that what a collector pays for? Probably not. Most of his other pieces on the site say sold, so I’m clearly the only one asking.
Szucsy, make me a lobster and I’ll find the wall space.