POSSIBLY GERMAN, PROBABLY MID-18TH CENTURY, THE SHELVES LATER

The brackets, with their female masks, recall the set of eight gilt gesso torcheres supplied in 1745-46 to Henry, 7th Viscount Irwin by the firm of James and Ann Pascall, carvers, gilders and picture-frame makers of `The Golden Head’, Long Acre, London (G.Beard & C. Gilbert, Dictionary of English Furniture Makers 1660 – 1840, Leeds, 1986, p. 679). Designed for the Gallery at Temple Newsam, Leeds, the torcheres along with a companion pair of side tables, were dispersed when Temple Newsam was sold by Lord Halifax in 1922 and in subsequent sales on 1939 and 1947 after which the suite was then gradually returned to Temple Newsam through various gifts and purchases. The last four torcheres were known in the collection of Walter P. Chrysler Junior in 1951, they were sold to a German collector in 1961 but then disappeared again until offered for sale in Zurich in 2007, at which time they were finally reunited with their counterparts. Writing at the time Anthony Wells-Cole described the female busts ` being subsumed into a mass of vegetation, seeming to depict the very moment that the nymph Syrinx was transformed into a bunch of reeds’ as described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses ( Furniture History Newsletter, no.169, February 2008, p.3). The brackets offered here seem to be similarly inspired.