A PAIR OF FRENCH PATINATED AND GILT BRONZE SIX-LIGHT FIGURAL CANDELABRA

French, early 19th Century, each cast as a winged Victory in classical drapery with a gilt girdle, standing upon a gilt sphere and raising above her head a basket of fruit issuing five scrolling foliate branches about a central stem, with floret-cast nozzles and circular drip pans, the sphere on a lotus-cast calyx above a cylindrical column finely chased with an imbricated ground, on a stiff-leaf moulded foot and stepped square base. (2) 74.5cm high, These candelabra belong to a celebrated group of Empire designs in which winged Victories raise baskets of fruit and flowers to carry the lights, a conceit drawn from antique sculpture and taken up by the Parisian bronziers in the opening years of the 19th Century. The finest examples are associated with Pierre-Philippe Thomire (1751-1843), who trained under the sculptor Augustin Pajou and worked in the circle of the ciseleur-doreur Pierre Gouthiere before supplying gilt bronze mounts to the Sèvres manufactory and becoming the pre-eminent bronzier of the Napoleonic era, appointed ciseleur de l'Empereur. The contrast of dark patination for the figures against burnished and matted gilding, seen to good effect here, is characteristic of the best Parisian work of the period

Estimate:£2,000

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