This chandelier is designed in the Grecian or antique fashion popularised by C. Percier and P. Fontaine's, Recueil de décorations intérieures, 1801. Its palm-leaf tazza frieze is flowered with Apollo sunflowers and its hollowed bowl evokes the festive harvest deities, Bacchus and Ceres, with a wreath of vine-entwined corn. The sunflowered frieze also features on a chandelier-tazza, surmounted by a dancing bacchante, illustrated in G. Henriot, Le Luminaire de la Renaissance au XIXème siècle, Paris, 1933, pl. 219 no. 20. Another of the latter model was sold at Christies, London, 11-12 June 2003, lot 52.
The present chandelier relates to various examples at Pavlovsk, and typifies the ardent fashion for opulent chandeliers in Russia in the late 18th and early 19th Century. Some of these were executed by Johann Zech, who, together with another craftsman named Fischer, was responsible for many of the chandeliers in the Imperial palaces in St. Petersburg. A closely related example, with similar applied maiden figures to the glass bowl, is in the corner sitting room at Pavlovsk and is illustrated in A. Gaydamak, Russian Empire, Moscow/Paris, 2000, pp. 126-128.