These are trade matters, but interesting withal, as they show the rapid rise under careful and patient intuition of skilled craftsmen whose resplendent models tempted the Continent to buy our replicas where perhaps the original work was either not proffered for sale or was too expensive for the continental market.
We give another illustration (p. [75]) of two table candlesticks, 1797 in date, sent out, as the catalogue states, by R. C. & Co. (Robert Cadman and Company). In one example we have the favourite design of the ostrich feathers beloved of Hepplewhite and others in the chair backs of the same period. The classic influence of Adam is waning. There is nothing purely Grecian in the column. The Ionic pillar has long since disappeared. We have something as a substitute in design. The Maltese cross as a novelty finds itself as a feature in the design. It is composite, it is in a measure feeble in comparison with previous designs. It marks the oncoming period. It is just the sign of something confused in the design. We shall soon see something not only confused but extremely mixed and utterly banal with false and meretricious ornament, with little meaning except that here it stands, as ornament or as attempt at ornament, but as to balance or symmetry—that has been irretrievably lost. The age of decadence no one can explain. One marvels as much at ineptitude as at beauty in design.
Happily the Sheffield designers went backwards for some of their designs in a period that threatened decadence. The smaller of the candlesticks (illustrated, p. [75]) suggests the reticence and simplicity of a brass candlestick of the Stuart period. As such it must be regarded. It stands quietly unassailable in its English dignity.
A fine clean-cut example, in date 1785, of pure design, with facets sharply cut and decorated with acanthus leaf design in due subjection, is illustrated (p. [83]). The urn stem and the urn nozzle determine the period, and the candlestick stands on a fine round base. Its clear defined reticence is almost like cut steel work on a minor plane of the same period, such as frames to cameos and later adapted to purses and chatelaines. Cut steel mounts to clock faces belonged to the coming Empire days. Here, in this candlestick illustrated, is an indication of facetted work as clean cut as glass, which in its working and in its technique is a metal too.
The Candelabrum.—Whatever may have been the varieties of the hanging candelabrum in Dutch interiors, finely wrought brass and copper with a variety of designs always pleasing and so attractive as to find a ready duplication as a modern electric light candelabrum, we do not find the table candelabrum at an early date in England. As days went on it became massive, and had seven or eight lights. Old engravings depict Jewish and other candelabra as standing on the ground, sometimes of great height and with many lights, but for domestic use their acceptance as table or sideboard lights came in the middle eighteenth century, in Georgian days with great spread of mahogany and massive furniture. They seem almost related to the Adam resuscitation of classic candelabra on tripod feet. But most of the massive Sheffield plated examples bear relationship to Hogarthian pre-Chippendale mahogany, and solid sideboards groaning with silver, engirt with monteiths and punch bowls and all the equipments of a period when members of Parliament hiccupped their speeches in the House, and when fox-hunting and port-drinking squires drank each other under the table. The evolution of the candelabrum from its simple form with two lights to its conclave of twelve is as interesting as the evolution of the gate-leg table during a somewhat longer period. In regard to practicability, as has been pointed out to the writer, some of the later replicas overdo the number in the attempt to be ornate, and if filled with candles and lighted they would burn each other. This is an interesting fact as indicating that sometimes in his attempt to be original the modern fabricator invents something that could never have been used. For, after all, our ancestors, however handicapped they were by want of illuminative mechanism, were never so foolish as to employ candelabra that would cause guttering by one candle firing another on account of its close proximity.
OLD SHEFFIELD PLATED CANDELABRUM.
Branched with seven lights. A square base with ball feet. Fluted decorations on column. Date 1820.
(By courtesy of Walter H. Willson, Esq.)
