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Lot Essay
The 'C' couronné poinçon was a tax mark applied to alloys containing copper between March 1745 and February 1749.
JUSTE-AURELE MEISSONNIER
The candelabra are a tour-de-force conceived entirely of swirling forms, characteristic of Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (1695-1750) one of the greatest proponents of the genre pittoresque, the earliest exuberant shout of the Rococo style. Meissonier and the genre pittoresque spurned symmetry and order and instead drew from nature, spinning its forms into romantic fantasy. The Italian-born son of a silversmith and sculptor, the young Meissonier moved from his native Turin to Paris in 1718, and in 1724 received his maître orfèvre warrant from Louis XV. His broader role at the court was reflected by his appointment in 1726 as successor to Jean Bérain II as dessinateur de la Chambre et du Cabinet du Roi, a position which provided him with a sizable regular income until his death, and positioned him to influence elite taste. His engraved designs were among the most influential of the period, remarkable for their organic and fluid forms and encompassing boiseries, bronzes d'ameublement, architectural schemes and spectacularly imaginative ideas for argenterie.
THE COLLECTION OF MRS. HAMILTON RICE
A philanthropist and South American explorer of the Gilded Age, Mrs. Eleanor Elkins Widener Rice (1861-1937) amassed a singular collection of French decorative art across three celebrated homes designed by Horace Trumbauer. With her marriage in 1883 to the Philadelphia traction magnate, George D. Widener (1861-1912), she joined one of the country’s premier art collecting families; the paintings assembled by her father-in-law and brother-in-law, Peter A.B. Widener (1834-1915) and Joseph Widener (1872-1943), went on to form the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. After the tragic loss of George and their younger son, Harry, on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, Eleanor remarried in 1915 to physician and Harvard professor Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, Jr., whom she would accompany on numerous South American expeditions, and with whom she would later construct a famed New York townhouse, her last commission from Trumbauer.
The New York house, commissioned in 1921, stood at 901 Fifth Avenue and was filled with French furniture and decorations, with several of the rooms originating from various Parisian hôtels. Although the architectural plan was generally executed in a restrained Louis XVI manner, the interior decoration supplied by Joseph Duveen embodied a much broader scope of the French decorative arts, including a Royal Louis XIV carpet in the Grand Salon and a French Gothic style for the library. The present candelabra were given pride-of-place atop a Louis XV-style bureau plat at the base of the main staircase. See M. C. Kathrens, American Splendor: the Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer, New York, 2002, pp. 191-201.
ELSIE DELORA KILVERT AND SAMUEL H. KRESS
Elsie Delora Kilvert, née Bernardo (1891-1961), was hailed by the Boston Globe upon her 1909 marriage to the cartoonist B. Cory Kilvert as "the prettiest and premier model in New York". By the 1920s, she had become the long-time companion of Samuel H. Kress (1853-1955), the retail magnate who assembled one of the most important collections of European art in the twentieth century and helped establish the National Gallery of Art. Mrs. Kilvert accompanied Kress on annual visits to Italy in the 1920s and 1930s and assisted in selecting works to furnish his duplex penthouse at 1020 Fifth Avenue, across from the Metropolitan Museum and just a few blocks north of Mrs. Aitken's apartment. Her contribution to the Kress Collection may even have included its very genesis: a November 1953 profile in Life magazine recounts that his collecting began around 1920, when she began bringing him to art galleries, having determined "to get Sam interested in beautiful things".
JUSTE-AURELE MEISSONNIER
The candelabra are a tour-de-force conceived entirely of swirling forms, characteristic of Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (1695-1750) one of the greatest proponents of the genre pittoresque, the earliest exuberant shout of the Rococo style. Meissonier and the genre pittoresque spurned symmetry and order and instead drew from nature, spinning its forms into romantic fantasy. The Italian-born son of a silversmith and sculptor, the young Meissonier moved from his native Turin to Paris in 1718, and in 1724 received his maître orfèvre warrant from Louis XV. His broader role at the court was reflected by his appointment in 1726 as successor to Jean Bérain II as dessinateur de la Chambre et du Cabinet du Roi, a position which provided him with a sizable regular income until his death, and positioned him to influence elite taste. His engraved designs were among the most influential of the period, remarkable for their organic and fluid forms and encompassing boiseries, bronzes d'ameublement, architectural schemes and spectacularly imaginative ideas for argenterie.
THE COLLECTION OF MRS. HAMILTON RICE
A philanthropist and South American explorer of the Gilded Age, Mrs. Eleanor Elkins Widener Rice (1861-1937) amassed a singular collection of French decorative art across three celebrated homes designed by Horace Trumbauer. With her marriage in 1883 to the Philadelphia traction magnate, George D. Widener (1861-1912), she joined one of the country’s premier art collecting families; the paintings assembled by her father-in-law and brother-in-law, Peter A.B. Widener (1834-1915) and Joseph Widener (1872-1943), went on to form the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. After the tragic loss of George and their younger son, Harry, on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, Eleanor remarried in 1915 to physician and Harvard professor Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice, Jr., whom she would accompany on numerous South American expeditions, and with whom she would later construct a famed New York townhouse, her last commission from Trumbauer.
The New York house, commissioned in 1921, stood at 901 Fifth Avenue and was filled with French furniture and decorations, with several of the rooms originating from various Parisian hôtels. Although the architectural plan was generally executed in a restrained Louis XVI manner, the interior decoration supplied by Joseph Duveen embodied a much broader scope of the French decorative arts, including a Royal Louis XIV carpet in the Grand Salon and a French Gothic style for the library. The present candelabra were given pride-of-place atop a Louis XV-style bureau plat at the base of the main staircase. See M. C. Kathrens, American Splendor: the Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer, New York, 2002, pp. 191-201.
ELSIE DELORA KILVERT AND SAMUEL H. KRESS
Elsie Delora Kilvert, née Bernardo (1891-1961), was hailed by the Boston Globe upon her 1909 marriage to the cartoonist B. Cory Kilvert as "the prettiest and premier model in New York". By the 1920s, she had become the long-time companion of Samuel H. Kress (1853-1955), the retail magnate who assembled one of the most important collections of European art in the twentieth century and helped establish the National Gallery of Art. Mrs. Kilvert accompanied Kress on annual visits to Italy in the 1920s and 1930s and assisted in selecting works to furnish his duplex penthouse at 1020 Fifth Avenue, across from the Metropolitan Museum and just a few blocks north of Mrs. Aitken's apartment. Her contribution to the Kress Collection may even have included its very genesis: a November 1953 profile in Life magazine recounts that his collecting began around 1920, when she began bringing him to art galleries, having determined "to get Sam interested in beautiful things".