Lot Essay
These wine-coolers or sceaux are designed in the antique manner as bacchic wine-krater vases and enriched with reed-gadroons. Their reeded handles, scrolled in the Etruscan or Grecian manner and with lion-mask terminals, are tied beneath the rims by fluted-ribbon bands. Standing on hollow-sided altar pedestals, their cut-cornered plinths are supported by triumphal victory-winged Egyptian lionesses emerging from bifurcating scrolls wrapped by Roman foliage and palm-flowers in the arabesque manner. They relate in particular to the French antique fashion promoted by the connoiseur Thomas Hope (d.1832) and derived in part from C. Percier and P. Fontaine's Receuil de decorations interieurs, 1801 and introduced at his London house in Duchess Street. Their pedestals relate to that of a Piranesian marble candelabrum illustrated in his guide to his museum/house entitled Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, 1807, pl. 1.