A PAIR OF GEORGE III GILTWOOD MIRRORS by Thomas Chippendale, each with oval plate, one later, in a narrow moulded frame carved in four bands with scalloped foliage, entrelacs, leaf-tips and beading, with fluted tablet-cresting and scrolled base converging on a foliate candle-branch socket framed by long leaves and resting on a ram's head, two long leaves and one ram's head replaced, minor restorations, lacking candle-branches and finial, one frame re-gilt

Details

A PAIR OF GEORGE III GILTWOOD MIRRORS by Thomas Chippendale, each with oval plate, one later, in a narrow moulded frame carved in four bands with scalloped foliage, entrelacs, leaf-tips and beading, with fluted tablet-cresting and scrolled base converging on a foliate candle-branch socket framed by long leaves and resting on a ram's head, two long leaves and one ram's head replaced, minor restorations, lacking candle-branches and finial, one frame re-gilt
40 x 27¾in. (101.5 x 69cm.) (2)

Provenance

Supplied to Edwin Lascelles, later Lord Harewood (d. 1795), almost certainly for the Dining Room at Harewood House, Yorkshire
Thence by descent to George, 7th Earl of Harewood, sold in these Rooms, 10 April 1986, lot 82

Literature

C. Gilbert, The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale, London, 1978, fig. 321

Lot Essay

The oval form of these 'gerandoles' with involuted scrolls are derived from the architect Robert Adam's Grecian palmette frame, as noted in the entry for the related Harewood 'gerandoles' also carved with French ribbon-twist guilloche borders (lot 51). The water-leaf border accompanied by pearls derives from the entablature of the Temple of Minerva Polias, illustrated in James Stuart's Antiquities of Athens, 1762. The crisply carved flowered-acanthus scrolls relate to that published 'for the use of carvers' in Matthias Lock's New Book of Foliage, 1769 (illustrated Furniture History Journal, vol. XV, 1979, pls. 60-3). The frames, which were no doubt originally surmounted by 'sacred' urns, are supported on 'antique' tablets embellished with sacrificial bacchic ram-masks, appropriate for a dining-room. These 'gerandoles' were almost certainly supplied by Thomas Chippendale (circa 1770) for the corner window-piers of the Dining Room at Harewood House, Yorkshire, which had been designed by Robert Adam. They accompanied the dining room's pier-sets of mirrors and tables which were also carved with guilloche bands and ram-masks (Gilbert, op.cit., p. 156, fig. 285 and 477).

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