A PAIR OF GEORGE III ORMOLU PERFUME-BURNERS by Matthew Boulton, each with central urn with circular pierced cover with flower-finial, laurel-leaves and a row of beading above a band of stylised palmettes and flowerheads, enclosing a gilt-lined copper bowl and with a flowerhead-filled entrelac neck, a band of Vitruvian scroll and elongated overlaid laurel-leaves, the tripod supports headed by winged lightly-clad figures en chignon, each with a necklace of beads supporting two chains in their cleavage which suspend a gadrooned circular burner with removable top of overlaid stiff-leaf and a pierced oil tube, the lower parts of the supports of tapering fluted pilaster form standing on birds's claw feet, the canted triangular plinth base headed by ram's mask angles joined by flowerhead-filled entrelac and the top of the plinth centred by a domed acanthus finial, the sides of the plinth each with a festive figure, two music-making, the canted tapering angles with laurel-trails, on a stepped base with a laurel-garlanded buchrania-mask to each side

The Property of VISCOUNT VILLIERS

细节

A PAIR OF GEORGE III ORMOLU PERFUME-BURNERS by Matthew Boulton, each with central urn with circular pierced cover with flower-finial, laurel-leaves and a row of beading above a band of stylised palmettes and flowerheads, enclosing a gilt-lined copper bowl and with a flowerhead-filled entrelac neck, a band of Vitruvian scroll and elongated overlaid laurel-leaves, the tripod supports headed by winged lightly-clad figures en chignon, each with a necklace of beads supporting two chains in their cleavage which suspend a gadrooned circular burner with removable top of overlaid stiff-leaf and a pierced oil tube, the lower parts of the supports of tapering fluted pilaster form standing on birds's claw feet, the canted triangular plinth base headed by ram's mask angles joined by flowerhead-filled entrelac and the top of the plinth centred by a domed acanthus finial, the sides of the plinth each with a festive figure, two music-making, the canted tapering angles with laurel-trails, on a stepped base with a laurel-garlanded buchrania-mask to each side
5¼in. (13.5cm.) wide, overall; 15¼in. (39cm.) high (2)

来源

Bought by Robert Child (d.1782), having been sold at Christie's in the second Boulton and Fothergill sale, April 1772 (see below)
Thence by descent

出版

Boulton archive, re: Christie's and Ansell sale, April 1772
William Linnell, Inventory of Household Goods... at Osterley House... late belonging.. to Robert Child Esquire, quoted in M. Tomlin, 'The 1782 Inventory of Osterley Park', Furniture History, 1986, p. 119
P. Macquoid and R. Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, London, rev. ed., 1954, vol. III, p. 16, fig. 2
R. Edwards, The Shorter Dictionary of English Furniture, London, 1964, p. 407, fig. 3

拍品专文

These tripod 'sacred-urns', of ovoid egg-shaped form with winged siren-monopodiae standing on bacchic altar-pedestals, are designed in the George III 'antique' manner promoted in the 1760s by architects such as James Wyatt (d. 1813). They were manufactued in 1771 by Messrs. Boulton and Fothergill of Birmingham and acquired the following year by Robert Child (d. 1792) of Child's Bank, Fleet Street, for his withdrawing-room at Osterley Park House, Middlesex. They featured in the accounts of William Matthews, Boulton's London financial agent, who retailed them through Messrs. Christie & Ansell's sale-room in April 1772, and noted 'For Mr Child, delivered from the sale - a pair of wing figured cassolettes with pedestals ¨29.8.0.' (see: N. Goodison, Ormolu, The Work of Matthew Boulton, London, 1974, p. 219). Another pair, lacking pedestals, were also purchased by George, Prince of Wales, later King George IV. The urns' design related to that of nymph-caryatid candelabra manufactured by Boulton, such as those purchased by Mr. Child at the same sale (see: N. Goodison, op. cit., fig. 126). Their manufacture was encouraged in 1771 by Mary Montague (see: ibid., p. 25); and derived in part from a Grecian 'cassolette' pattern illustrated in Marie Vien, Suite de Vases, 1760 (see: T. Clifford, English Ceramic Circle Transactions, 1977, pl. 83). Related monopodiae, which featured on Boulton's pattern for a water-jug stand (Goodison, op. cit., fig. 155), derived from a design by the architect James Wyatt (see: K. Quickenden, 'Boulton and Fothergill silver', Burlington Magazine, June 1986, p. 419). Such cassolettes were associated in antiquity with hospitality and banquets; and their pedestals, hung with bacchic ram-heads, are embellished with figurative bas-reliefs of a Dionysiac/bacchic festival in the manner of an antique marble altar. The bacchic panther accompanies the wine-god Silenus with his thyrsus and liknos (basket), while a trumpet-blowing faun, like that on the antique Borghese vase, announces the unveiling of a wine-krater and a companion nymph dances by a thyrsus and wine-patera