A PAIR OF IMPORTANT JAMES I SILVER CANDLESTICKS

Details

A PAIR OF IMPORTANT JAMES I SILVER CANDLESTICKS
LONDON, 1618, MAKER'S MARK CC TREE BETWEEN (JACKSON, NEW ED. P. 111, LINE 6)

Each on three cylindrical supports with applied reeded borders centering tubular braces below a circular dish and urn form knop, all below a cylindrical socket with similar applied bands, each fully marked on socket--8in.(20.2cm.) high
(26oz.10dwt.) (2)

Provenance

by descent to
Sir Edward Repps Jodrell, Bt.
The Jodrell Heirlooms, Christie's, London, July 20, 1888, lot 121 ( 106 19s to Phillips)
The Swaythling Collection
The Renowned Collection of Silversmiths' Work formed by the Right Hon. Montagu, First Lord Swaythling...the Swaythling Heirlooms, Christie's, London, May 24, 1924, lot 54 ( 420 to H. Webster)
Sold privately to William Randolph Hearst in 1930 for 837
A Very Choice Assemblage of Old English Silver ... the Property of a Gentleman, a well-known Collector, [William Randolph Hearst], Sotheby's, London, November 17, 1937, lot 60 ( 650)
Harold, 1st Viscount Rothermere, thence by descent

Literature

J. Starkie Gardner, Old Silver-Work, Chiefly English, from the XV to the XVIII Centuries, ex. cat., 1903, plate LIX (one of the pair illustrated, lent by Sir Samuel Montagu, later Lord Swaythling)

Sir Charles James Jackson, An Illustrated History of Old English Plate, vol. II, illus. fig. 1106

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Michael Clayton, The Collector's Dictionary of the Gold and Silver and Great Britain and North America, 1985 ed., the 1615 example illus. fig. 68

Exhibited

London, St. James's Court, 1902, plate LIX, fig. 1

Lot Essay

This pair of candelsticks and another, single example of 1615 in a private collection, are virtually unique survivals of utilitarian silver made at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Although Henry VIII is known to have possessed four candlesticks made of gold, enamelled in red and decorated with his monogram, table candlesticks are extremely rare prior to the Restoration. With the exception of the rock crystal and silver-gilt two-light example called the Sanford candlestick and datable to circa 1580, and a pair of silver-gilt and rock crystal examples in the Philadelphia Museum of Art dating from 1610, these would appear to be the earliest hallmarked English silver candlesticks.

The single example of 1615, maker's mark WC, was exhibited at the Park Lane exhibition in 1929 (no. 515) and sold at Christie's, London, July 11, 1945, lot 207 to the Goldsmiths' Company. It passed into the collection of Madame Alice Gautret-Goldsmith and was subsequently purchased by Spink in 1974. It was exhibited by them in their 1975 exhibition Early English Silver (no. 4).

The Jodrell Heirlooms, a series of sales held at Christie's in 1888 following the death in that year of Lucinda, widow of Sir Edward Repps Jodrell, 3rd Baronet, dispersed a broad range of furniture, pictures, and silver, much of which had descended from Henry Lombe, worsted weaver of Norwich, who died in 1695, the son of Edward Lombe, who was the uncle of Edward Lombe, the maternal grandfather of the 1st Baronet.