POSSIBLY AFTER A DESIGN BY JAMES WYATT

Conceived in the George III manner as Roman gilt-enriched bronze urns, they are likely to have embellished tripod-candelabra stands, and relate to a Roman candelabrum pattern in Robert and James Adam The Works in Architecture, London, 1773, (vol. 1, pl. III). Designed in wine-krater form with arched handles, they relate to urns displayed in the freize of a Salamonic Temple with palm-flowered columns, that featured in the 1733 English edition of R. Freart's Parallele de l'architecture antique et de la moderne. Appropriate for a room-of-entertainment, their palm and reed enrichments are combined with laurel-festooned ribbons displaying scalloped libation-patterae and sacred veils. They relate in particular to painted sideboard-pedestal urns that are highly likely to have been designed in the early 1770s by the architect James Wyatt (d. 1813) for Sambrooke Freeman, for Fawley Court, Oxfordshire. Wyatt's design for the ceiling of the Fawley Court banqueting room is flowered with a sunflower derived from Apollo's temple illustrated in Robert Wood's, Ruins of Palmyra, 1753, and also incorporates related scalloped libation-paterae and wine-krater vases. (see J. Cornforth 'In Search of Distinction; the architect James Wyatt, Country Life, 23 May 1996, fig. 12. The design was sold anonymously, in these Rooms 30 November 1983, lot 174).
Related sideboard-pedestal urns, with metal arms were supplied in the late 1760s for Osterley Park, Middlesex by the Berkeley Square firm of John and William Linnell, who were also employed at Fawley, (H. Hayward and P. Kirkham, William and John Linnell, London, 1980, vol. I, p. 154, figs. 299 and 300). However it is also worth noting that the Salamonic vase also featured in furniture designed in 1765 by the Golden Square firm of John Mayhew and William Ince (C. Musgrave, Adam and Hepplewhite Furniture, London, 1966, fig. 119).