CIRCA 1780, POSSIBLY NORTH EUROPEAN

The golden candlesticks, with urn-capped pillars, are designed in the George III French antique fashion introduced around 1770 by the Birmingham manufactory of Matthew Boulton and John Fothergill. This celebrated firm, like Wedgwoods Staffordshire manufactory at Etruria, provided decorative vase/urn garnitures so essential to the 1760s Etruscan columbarium style introduced by the Rome-trained court architect Robert Adam (d.1792). Evoking classical poetry concerning sacrifices at loves altar, they are wreathed by Venus pearl-strings and display Apollo palm-wreathed vases on French gôut Grec pillars, whose sarcophagus-scrolled and strigil-fluted balusters are festooned with laurelled Roman foliage. Their impressive hollow-sided, antique-fluted and flower-wreathed altar pedestals corresponds to the pattern introduced for some of Boulton's ormolu-enriched Roman marble or blue john vases of egg-bodied wine-krater form. Two such bacchic ram-headed vases, also bear palm-wreathed candle-vase nozzles as illustrated in a surviving Boulton pattern-book, and are illustrated in N. Goodison, Matthew Boulton: Ormolu, London, 2002 (fig 280).