Lot Essay
Perhaps intended to recall Venus's love for Adonis, the lamps are borne by boar-heads emerging from 'rhyton' horn-shaped vessels and are displayed on Grecian-stepped pedestals with bacchic lion-paw feet. A celebrated antiquity of rhyton form, illustrated in G.B. Piranesi's Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi, Sarcofagi..., 1778, provided the inspiration for their pattern.
Thomas Hope illustrated a rhyton horn with boar's head and scrolled handle, in the frieze of one of his rooms at his Duchess Street house, in his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, London, 1807, pl.VII.
Another pair, of this model, displayed in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, bears the manufacturers mark of Thomas Messenger and Sons of Birmingham and London. Their trade-card, featuring Roman candelabra and a rhyton, describes the firm as 'Manufacturers of Chandeliers, Tripods and Lamps of every description in bronze and or-molu' (C. Gilbert and A. Wells-Cole, The Fashionable Fire Place, 1660-1840, Temple Newsam House, Leeds, 1985, p. 140, fig. 95).
Thomas Hope illustrated a rhyton horn with boar's head and scrolled handle, in the frieze of one of his rooms at his Duchess Street house, in his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration, London, 1807, pl.VII.
Another pair, of this model, displayed in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, bears the manufacturers mark of Thomas Messenger and Sons of Birmingham and London. Their trade-card, featuring Roman candelabra and a rhyton, describes the firm as 'Manufacturers of Chandeliers, Tripods and Lamps of every description in bronze and or-molu' (C. Gilbert and A. Wells-Cole, The Fashionable Fire Place, 1660-1840, Temple Newsam House, Leeds, 1985, p. 140, fig. 95).