CIRCA 1760-65, POSSIBLY ATTRIBUTABLE TO WILLIAM FRANCE AND JOHN BRADBURN

This girandole mirror, with its poetic laurels and volute scrolls of Roman acanthus, relates to those described in 1764 as "2 elegant carved Girandoles with a large plate of Glass, and 3 lights in each to shew in the Glass, festoons and rop[e]s of husks falling from Different parts... all gilt in Burnished Gold", listed in an invoice sent to Sir Lawrence Dundas by the St. Martins Lane cabinet-maker William France (d. 1773). Supplied at a cost of £56 12s, these girandoles remain at Aske Hall, Yorkshire, in the collection of the Marquess of Zetland and are discussed in A. Coleridge, "Some Rococo cabinet-makers and Sir Lawrence Dundas", Apollo, September, 1967 p.217, fig.4. A larger pair of girandoles of this model, also supplied to Dundas but for the Front Ground Floor Room at Arlington Street, where they are illustrated n situ in Country Life in 1921, were supplied at a cost of £97 12s; these were sold from the collection of Ogden Phipps, Sotheby's New York, 19 October 2002, lot 75.

A very similar pair of girandoles was with Hotspur, Ltd., and are published in N. Goodison and R. Kern, Hotspur Eighty Years of Antique Dealing, London, 2004, pp. 232-33.