A PAIR OF EMPIRE ORMOLU AND PATINATED BRONZE SIX-BRANCH CANDELABRA

These candelabra relate to a design by the architect Charles Percier, produced as part of a commission to furnish Empress Josephine's boudoir at the Château de Saint Cloud (illustrated M.L. Myers, French Architectural and Ornament Drawings of the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1992, cat. 98, pp. 157-8). The model is particularly associated with the work of Pierre-Philippe Thomire (1751-1843), the celebrated bronzier of the Empire period, who supplied bronzes d'ameublement for Napoleon's Palaces. The quality of casting, chasing, grand size and overall richness of decoration of the present pair suggests a leading maker such as Thomire or his contemporary Claude Galle (1757-1815). A comparable example of this model by Thomire is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, while elements of the distinctive ornamentation found on the base, such as the flaming torch or thyrsus to the corners and the berried swags, are present on objects by Galle, such as a clock dated to 1810 (see H. Ottomeyer and P. Pröschel, Vergoldete Bronzen, 1986, vol. 1, p. 329, fig. 5.2.4; p. 372, fig. 5.14.1). A fashionable Empire motif, the swag and thyrsus is also found on a clock representing Study by the bronzier Pierre-Victor Ledure, circa 1814, now in the British Embassy in Paris and on a table a nuit by Jacob Frères based on a design by Percier & Fontaine (illustrated ibid, p. 350, fig. 5.7.3; D.Ledoux-Lebard, Le Mobilier Français du XIXe siècle, 1989, 317).