Live Auction 5438The Sunday Sale
A NEAR PAIR OF REGENCY BRONZE COLZA-OIL RHYTON LAMPS
Lot 173

A NEAR PAIR OF REGENCY BRONZE COLZA-OIL RHYTON LAMPS

BY THOMAS MESSENGER & SONS, CIRCA 1820

Closed30 November 2008

Price Realised

GBP 1,750

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A NEAR PAIR OF REGENCY BRONZE COLZA-OIL RHYTON LAMPS
By Thomas Messenger & Sons, circa 1820
Each cast with a boar's head below a fluted reservoir and supporting a lamp on a bronze and foliate cast plinth, one stamped 'MESSENGER' to the underside of the base, later adapted to accomodate electricity and with later storm shades
12¼ in. (31 cm.) wide (2)

Specialist note

The boar-headed 'rhyton' horn lamp derives from a celebrated antiquity illustrated in G.B. Piranesi's, 'Vasi, Candelabri, Cippi, Sarcofagi...', 1778. The stamp of Thomas Messenger and Sons of Birmingham is recorded on a pair of closely related lamps in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and a rhyton also features on the firm's trade-card of the 1830s (C. Gilbert and A Wells-Cole, The Fashionable Fire Place, 1660-1840, Temple Newsam House, Leeds, 1985, pp.145 and 140 fig. 95).