Lot Essay
These Grecian urn-bearing vestals are conceived in the French antique manner to evoke sacrifices at love's altar in antiquity as appropriate garniture for George III dressing-tables. They also reflect the antique 'columbarium' (vase chamber) fashion introduced in the 1760s by the Rome-trained architects William Chambers (d. 1796) and Robert Adam (d. 1792). Their festive krater urns are enwreathed by laurels and palms, while Apollonian laurels also entwine their tazze, serpentined in cornucopiae horns-of-plenty from palm-branches, as well as their tripod wave-scrolled plinths. Their pattern, evolved from hermed or thermed pillars after a Louis Quatorze Roman guéridon torchere design, was also executed in silver, such as those supplied in 1770 by the court Goldsmith Thomas Heming and bearing the arms of Henry, 8th Baron Arundell (d. 1808) and his wife Mary (d.1813) (see John Overton's publication of Jean le Pautre's Livre de Miroirs, Tables et Gueridons, issued in London in 1676; and candlesticks sold Christie's, King Street, 12 June 2006, lot 288).