A PAIR OF LATE VICTORIAN GILT-LACQUERED BRASS-MOUNTED MAHOGANY CELLARETS
A PAIR OF LATE VICTORIAN GILT-LACQUERED BRASS-MOUNTED MAHOGANY CELLARETS

ATTRIBUTED TO CONRATH & SONS, CIRCA 1890-1900

Details
A PAIR OF LATE VICTORIAN GILT-LACQUERED BRASS-MOUNTED MAHOGANY CELLARETS
ATTRIBUTED TO CONRATH & SONS, CIRCA 1890-1900
Each hexagonal, with knopped finial and hinged lids above a partitioned lead-lined interior, the bodies with Greek-key and guilloche bands and pierced circular handles, on hooved legs headed by palmettes
28 in. (71 cm.) high, 19 in. (48 cm.) diameter
Provenance
With Frank Partridge, Inc., New York.
Alfred H. Caspary, New York and Bonnie Doon, Ritter, South Carolina.
The late Alfred H. Caspary, New York; Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 29-30 April 1955, lot 276.
Gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1964.
Literature
Y. Hackenbroch, English Furniture with some furniture from other countries in the Irwin Untermyer Collection, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958, pl. 29, fig. 49, pp. 15-16.
Highlights of the Untermyer Collection of English and Continental Decorative Arts, New York, 1977, no. 177, p. 97.

Lot Essay

A virtually identical cellaret design was advertised by Conrath of North Audley Street, London as French 'Empire' in style in the trade periodical, The Cabinet Maker & Art Furnisher, January 1895. Conrath's ram-headed design and a cellarette of the same pattern are illustrated in F. Collard, Regency Furniture, 1985, p. 245. Another, at Balls Park, Hertfordshire, is illustrated in R. Edwards & P. Macquoid, The Dictionary of English Furniture, rev. ed., 1954, vol. III, p. 133, fig. 24; and a further example, formerly in the collection of the collector Colonel Norman Colville, was sold Christie's, London, 20 September 2001, lot 50.

The cellarets once belonged to the New York stockbroker, art collector and renowned philatelist Alfred H. Caspary (d. 1955), who housed them in his South Carolina Plantation, Bonnie Doon, which he purchased in 1931. (The original eighteenth-century house was torched by General Sherman's troops in 1865.) Caspary sold Bonnie Doon in 1954, the year before his death, to J. Peter Grace, the head of the W. R. Grace Company.

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