MARK OF MATTHEW BOULTON AND JOHN FOTHERGILL, BIRMINGHAM, 1774, AFTER A DESIGN BY JAMES WYATT

JAMES WYATT AND MATTHEW BOULTON
These candlesticks are based on a design by the neo-classical and gothic revival architect James Wyatt (1746-1813). Wyatt attained recognition early in his career with the building of the Pantheon in Oxford Street, begun in 1769. He is perhaps best remembered as the architect of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, the collector William Beckford's ill-fated gothic tour-de-force, built between 1796 and 1812. Wyatt designed both furniture and silver for his clients, working with the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton from as early as 1769. A detailed study of Wyatt's designs for silver can be found in John Martin Robinson's exhaustive study of Wyatt's career, James Wyatt, Architect to George III, New Haven and London, 2012, pp. 131-139.

The present candlesticks are typical of Wyatt's delicate, attenuated neo-classical style, seen in his interiors at Heveningham Hall, Suffolk, and in his Strawberry Room from Lee Priory, now installed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Boulton engaged Wyatt and other architects to provide designs for silver objects made at his Birmingham Soho Manufactory, which was developing high quality wares to appeal to a more fashionable and refined clientele. With the production of such objects, Boulton and Fothergill sought to remove 'the prejudice that Birmingham hath so justly established against itself', as written in a Boulton and Fothergill letter of 1768, quoted in Frances Fergusson's 'Wyatt Silver', The Burlington Magazine, December 1974. Boulton included an engraving of Wyatt's design for the present candlesticks in his Soho Pattern Books (v. I, f. 43), where the design appears with a modified base matching those on the surviving examples in silver.

Candlesticks of this form include a pair from the same set as the present examples, which remain at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, one illustrated in R. Rowe, Adam Silver, London, 1965, fig. 50, and a pair of 1774 at the Birmingham Assay Office, illustrated in R. Ransome-Wallis, Matthew Boulton and the Toymakers, London, 1982, p. 12. Boulton and Fothergill made another version in silver with a slightly different base molding. Examples of this model include a set of four of 1773 at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, and a pair of the same year sold Sotheby's, London, 28 March 1968, lot 155. A pair of silver-plated candlesticks identical to the present examples is in the collection of Colonial Williamsburg, illustrated and discussed in J. Davis, English Silver at Williamsburg, Williamsburg, 1976, no. 254, p. 226.

MATTHEW BOULTON AND JOHN FOTHERGILL
Matthew Boulton went into partnership with John Fothergill 1762, and their Soho Manufactory, a model of its kind, was housed in its new Palladian building by 1765. In the five years following, the capacity for producing larger silver wares and not merely toys, such as buckles and buttons, increased. From the late 1760s a handful of objects survive made by Boulton and Fothergill in their Birmingham factory but hallmarked at Chester, the nearest assay office. By incessant lobbying and by joining forces with the silversmiths of Sheffield, who were in a similar predicament, Boulton at last received Royal assent for a bill setting up assay offices in the two towns on 28 May 1773. The Birmingham assay office opened on 31 August 1773, with Boulton and Fothergill the first to enter their maker's marks. Silver struck with both marks is rare. (See K. Crisp Jones, ed., The Silversmiths of Birmingham and their Marks, 1750-1980, London, 1981, pp. 27-29.)

Drawing for a candlestick, by James Wyatt, from his album of designs now in the collection of the Vicomte de Noailles, Paris. Courtesy the Board of Trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum.