FIRST HALF 18TH CENTURY, POSSIBLY IRISH

Details

A GEORGE II GILTWOOD MIRROR
FIRST HALF 18TH CENTURY, POSSIBLY IRISH
The oval plate in a scalloped border with recessed cabochons interspersed with flowerheads, the outer reeded edge carved with berried foliage and scrolled acanthus, the cresting with a pierced shell above a satyr's mask, the apron with a ram's head, regilt, probably originally fitted in wall panelling
58½ x 38 in. (147 x 96.5 cm.)

Provenance

Anonymous sale, Christie's, London, 24 June 1982, lot 27.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

The pier glass, appropriate for a dining-room setting, is conceived in the George II 'picturesque' fashion to evoke the poets' concept of the Feast of Bacchus in antiquity. A bacchic satyr-mask is displayed in a palm-wreathed and antique-fretted 'Venus' shell cartouche that crowns the flowered Roman-medallion frame; while vines and other fruits garland its border of beribboned reeds, whose wave-scrolled volutes are tied by the horns of a bacchic ram at the base. With the Water Element recalled by its serpentined band of water-bubbled scallops, it relates to carver's patterns issued in the 1740s and 1750s by Matthias Lock, Thomas Johnson and Thomas Chippendale.

More from Thomas Hope & The Neoclassical Vision & The Collector of Collections

View All