PARTS LOUIS XVI, CIRCA 1780, PARTS RESTAURATION, CIRCA 1820

The motif of a drapery-tied backplate is first recorded as early as 1756 on the wall lights designed by Pierre Contant d'Ivry and supplied by Thomas Germain in 1756 to the duc d'Orléans for the Palais-Royal. Now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, they are illustrated in P. Verlet, Les Bronzes Dorés Français du XVIIIe Siècle, France, 1987, no. 18, p. 30. This model, however, clearly conceived in the late Transitional style dating from circa 1775-80 and its ribbon-tied cresting and reeded branches more closely recall the wall lights supplied by Quentin-Claude Pitoin in 1777 for M. Amelot, ministre de la maison du Roi, see op.cit., p. 89, ill. 94. These wall lights belong to a group consisting of at least twelve identical examples; of these, one pair was sold from the Collection Lehmann in Paris, Galerie Georges Petit, 4-5 June 1925, lot 92; another pair, probably the same, was sold from the collection of Jaime Ortiz-Patiño, Sotheby's New York, 20 May 1992, lot 38; a pair in the Alexander Collection sold Christie’s New York, 30 April 1999, lot 179; four further wall lights of this model are discussed in Partridge, Recent Acquisitions 1996, London, no.44, p.107.