ATTRIBUTED TO THOMAS JOHNSON, CIRCA 1755

This pair of superbly carved Rococo wall lights, with fantastical dragon motifs, is attributed to the foremost designer-craftsman of the period, Thomas Johnson. Their design reflects the 18th century trade with China that achieved its highpoint in the 1750s. Both Matthias Lock, and his informal pupil, Thomas Johnson, incorporated such ornamentation in their designs for pier glasses and tables, and overmantels, which were published in, respectively, Lock’s Six Sconces (1744), Six Tables (1746), A New Book of Ornaments (1752) and Johnson’s One Hundred and Fifty New Designs (first published in 1758). In fact, in circa August 1744, Johnson, who was employed by Whittle and Norman at the time, was dismissed from their workshop for carving ‘a glass frame that had a dragon in [sic] the top’ for Lock; a style much favoured by the latter in the mid-1740s (J. Simon, ‘Thomas Johnson’s “The Life of the Author”’, Furniture History, vol. 39, 2003, p. 4).
In the original copy of Johnson’s Life of the Author (1793) there is a small drawing, dated 1746, for a 'Contrast bracket to hold a small figure or busto', which is related to the present wall lights (held in the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London). The culmination of Johnson’s use of dragon ornamentation is probably the remarkable set of mirrors, a pair and a single, known as ‘The Dragon Mirrors’, commissioned for Bective House, Mary Street, Dublin by Sir Thomas Taylor MP, 1st Earl of Bective (d. 1795), now in the collection of the Bishop’s Palace, Waterford. These mirrors have been firmly attributed to Johnson on the grounds of style and family tradition; Johnson was in Ireland in the early 1750s, employed in the Dublin workshop of William Partridge, the preeminent carver in the city (E. McEneaney, ‘The Dragon Mirrors’, Irish Arts Review, vol. 31, no. 3, Autumn 2014, p. 144).