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

With their finely chased candle arms and graciously proportioned canephore support figures draped à l’antique, these impressive candelabra are fully evocative of the refined neoclassical taste that reached its zenith during the Empire in early 19th-century France. Their exacting details and sophisticated form recall the work of one of the era’s preeminent bronziers, François Rémond as they relate to a pair of candelabra with almost identical gilt-bronze figures, described as `girandoles à figure,’ almost certainly purchased by the marchand-mercier Dominique Daguerre from the bronzier in December 1785, and resold shortly thereafter to the Princesse Kinsky (C. Baulez, `Le Luminaire de la Princesse Kinsky,’ L’Estampille/L’Objet d’art, no. 247, May 1991, pp. 84-99; later sold Christie’s, Monaco, 15 June 1997, lot 91 (1,772,500 FF).

While the Kinsky candelabra are dated to 1785 – a final flourishing of the Louis XVI style – Rémond continued to create this model into the early 1800s, modifying the candle branches and bases to befit the subtle and ever-changing French interpretations of the antique (ibid., p. 88). The first of two such pairs is at the Chateau de Fontainebleau (F 564 C, illustrated in J.-P. Samoyault, Pendules et bronzes d’ameublement entrés sous le Premier Empire, Paris, 1989, p. 155, no. 132); and the second in the collections of the Mobilier National (GML 4467/1-2, illustrated in M.-F. Dupuy-Baylet, L’heure, le feu et la Lumière, Les Bronzes du Mobilier National 1800-1870, Dijon, 2010, pp. 90-91, no. 40).