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Lot Essay
The triumphal-arched chimney-piece is elegantly serpentined in the French 'picturesque' manner and celebrates the Spring Season. Its frieze displays the head of the festive deity Flora, wreathed with flowers and the nature deity's pearls. She is garlanded with flowers that suspend from the reeded border of the hearth, while flowered scrolls of Roman acanthus issue from voluted reeds. Roman foliage also wraps the garlanded trusses of its pilasters, which supported reed-enriched shell cartouches, symbolising the triumph of Venus as Nature deity.
Its architecture and shell-capped volutes derive in part from chimney-pieces illustrated in Jacques-François Blondel's De la distribution des maisons de plaisance, vol. II, Paris, 1738, and Charles Etienne Briseux, L'Art de bâtir des maisons de campagne, 1743. A related pattern, with garlanded Flora pilasters framing an acanthus-wrapped flower-basket perched on voluted reeds, featured in Isaac Ware's (d.1766), Complete Body of Architecture, 1756. Ware had introduced such French architecture at Chesterfield House, Mayfair in the late 1740s. Around 1750 another pattern book for such chimneypieces was issued by Peter Glazier and entitled Ornaments in the modern French and Chinese Taste consisting of Various designs for Mantles and Chimney Pieces.
A marble chimneypiece with similar central 'Flora' mask and shaped frieze is in the Green Drawing Room, Blenheim Palace, and is likely to have been introduced by Charles Churchill, 3rd Duke of Marlborough, who succeeded to the estate in 1729 (I. Caldwell, The Antique Collector, September 1991, p. 80, fig. 2).
Its architecture and shell-capped volutes derive in part from chimney-pieces illustrated in Jacques-François Blondel's De la distribution des maisons de plaisance, vol. II, Paris, 1738, and Charles Etienne Briseux, L'Art de bâtir des maisons de campagne, 1743. A related pattern, with garlanded Flora pilasters framing an acanthus-wrapped flower-basket perched on voluted reeds, featured in Isaac Ware's (d.1766), Complete Body of Architecture, 1756. Ware had introduced such French architecture at Chesterfield House, Mayfair in the late 1740s. Around 1750 another pattern book for such chimneypieces was issued by Peter Glazier and entitled Ornaments in the modern French and Chinese Taste consisting of Various designs for Mantles and Chimney Pieces.
A marble chimneypiece with similar central 'Flora' mask and shaped frieze is in the Green Drawing Room, Blenheim Palace, and is likely to have been introduced by Charles Churchill, 3rd Duke of Marlborough, who succeeded to the estate in 1729 (I. Caldwell, The Antique Collector, September 1991, p. 80, fig. 2).