拍品 71
71
A PAIR OF GEORGE III ORMOLU-MOUNTED BLUE JOHN TWO-LIGHT VASE CANDELABRA
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buy… 顯示更多 PROPERTY OF THE LATE SIR ARTHUR GILBERT TO BE SOLD FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE GILBERT COLLECTION AT SOMERSET HOUSE (LOTS 70-71)
A PAIR OF GEORGE III ORMOLU-MOUNTED BLUE JOHN TWO-LIGHT VASE CANDELABRA

BY MATTHEW BOULTON, CIRCA 1770, WITH LATER COVERS AND LOWER PLINTH

細節
A PAIR OF GEORGE III ORMOLU-MOUNTED BLUE JOHN TWO-LIGHT VASE CANDELABRA
BY MATTHEW BOULTON, CIRCA 1770, WITH LATER COVERS AND LOWER PLINTH
Each with a vase-shaped body below a circular pierced frieze and domed cover with berried finial, the sides with upspringing foliage issuing acanthus-clasped serpentine branches with foliate drip-pans and lappeted nozzles, on a fluted spreading socle with square stepped base, one vase with restored breaks, the underside of one lid with paper label printed 'TU1' and inscribed '28', one with later drip-pans and nozzles
13 in. (33 cm.) high (2)
注意事項
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price plus buyer's premium.

拍品專文

The provision of elegant lighting, suitable for the glittering Roman style apartments introduced by George III's Rome-trained court architects Sir William Chambers (d. 1796) and Robert Adam (d. 1792), was facilitated in the late 1760s with the establishment by Matthew Boulton and John Fothergill of a manufactory for such 'vase' candelabra executed in French-fashioned ormolu. These objets d'art, recalling the festive wine 'kraters' of antiquity, were primarily intended as garnitures for mantelpieces or gueridon-stands, but also served as candle-bearers and 'cassolette' essence-pots. While thyrsic finials, sacred to the wine-deity Bacchus, crown their domed lids, bacchic lion-pelts veil their polished 'egg' bodies of rich veined Derbyshire 'blue-john' fluorspar, which are mounted on antique-fluted and reeded pedestals with conjoined Grecian-stepped plinths. Boulton, who derived this 'lyon' face from a Parisian candlestick that was designed with hermed and veil-draped lion-monopodiae in the Egyptian style, once wrote that while assimilating elements from various styles such as the 'French, Roman, Athenian, Egyptian, Arabesk, and Etruscan' , he always took 'elegant simplicity' as his leading principal (N. Goodison, Matthew Boulton: Ormolu, London, 2002, pp. 66-7 and p. 187).