A Pair of Art Deco Ceramic Candle Holders by Roockwood Pottery, ca. 1920

American Arts & Crafts A Pair of Table Lamps Patinated Bronze Circa 1910 DIMENSIONS Height: 15 inches Width: 6 inches Depth: 12 ...

A duo of anodized brass candlesticks, each featuring a round base, stem and a lotus flower that contains a regular size candle. Manufactured in the USA during the 1960s. The cand...

Bronze, dark-brown patina, unmarked. Measures: Height: 23” Width: 14” The notion of an “American Rococo” seems a contradiction in terms. The very word rococo is as French as Camembert. It connotes a style that reigned along with Louis XV in the aristocratic decadence of the 18th Century. It was garlanded, nonchalant, associated with erotic marshmallow nudes by Francois Boucher and foppish courtiers costumed as shepherds pretending they understood Jean-Jacques Rousseau when all they really wanted was romantic dalliance in the formal gardens of Versailles. In the history of painting it produced but one great artist, Antoine Watteau. By contrast, Americans of the period are remembered as the flinty inheritors of New England Puritans, full of rectitude and having not a moment for furbelow or frippery. Such few painters as were around included hard-nosed realists like John Singleton Copley and Charles Willson Peale. Well, as it turns out, life once again acts according to the principle of paradox. There was an American rococo. It came to us indirectly via England disguised under the name Chippendale. Now for the first time the style receives comprehensive survey in the exhibition “American Rococo, 1750-1775: Elegance in Ornament.” Jointly organized by New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it opens here Sundaywith a spread of some 170 works of decorative art and a conscientious catalogue with essays by Met and LACMA curators Morrison H. Heckscher and Leslie Greene Bowman. There are at least two ways of looking at the decorative arts. Connoisseurs appreciate their design and craftsmanship. Those of sociological bent examine objects of material culture for their revelations of history and the temper of the times. Actually neither view is complete without the other. Stylistically the rococo reveals a longing for intimacy in its small scale and an urge to organic nature in its love of stylized vines, tendrils, tiny flowers and seashells. If it were a new manner being promoted by Madison Avenue today it would probably be called “Baroque Lite.” There is an ease about the style that makes it airy, but it has an underlying formality that bespeaks lives of gentrified cultivation rather than beer-bellied sloth. It’s fascinating to examine the flintlock firearms on view and find these weapons of death shaped and decorated with the most exquisite care by wood carvers and metal engravers. All of this is completely consistent with the main currents of 18th-Century European thought. In France, Rousseau sang the virtues of nature and the noble savage like a present-day ecologist. In England, John Locke...

Alfonso Canciani (Italian-Austrian, 1863-1955) was a famous Italian-Austrian sculptor of the period of accession to the Viennese Secession. Son of a stonemason, after a realist period he managed to establish himself as a leading sculptor of the Viennese Secession. In fact, he worked in Vienna, where he had enrolled in 1886 at the Academy of Fine Arts, then at the Higher School of Sculpture and finally at the Special School, where he obtained the Rome prize for the sketch for Dante's Monument. He developed a notable business obtaining important prizes and numerous commissions. First among the sculptors of the Viennese capital, he was invited to join the Association of the Viennese Secession, of which Klimt was magna pars, after the exhibition of Dante's group in 1900 at the Secession exhibition, and obtained the most important Austrian artistic prize, the Kunstlerlpreis. This same work, presented in 1910 in Berlin, at the Great Art Exhibition, also received an important recognition here. He obtained the Rome prize in 1896, exhibited successfully in Munich and in 1899 at the III International Art Exhibition in Venice. In that period he made some statues of saints for the cathedral of Santo Stefano in Vienna, the monument to Wagner, the bust of Nietzsche for the University, the scepter and the gold chain of the University Rector, figures of Italian poets ( Petrarch, Boccaccio, Tasso, Ariosto). He submitted a sketch for the official monument to Empress Elizabeth, which was then built in Austrisn Gföhl and Pula. At the time of his accession to the Secession, he dedicated himself to decorating the facade of the Artaria house in Vienna in collaboration with the architect Max Fabiani. He later abandoned the symbolist decorativism of the Jugendstil for a more concentrated and vigorous style, approaching the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier for the theme of work, and preferring to exhibit at the Künstlerhaus. In Vienna, he was generous with advice and help with the Italians and in particular with his fellow citizens (such as the Brazzanese Luigi Visintin, then a university student). After the First World War, he returned to Italy and lived in Friuli, penalized by the fact that the Habsburg Empire had by now disappeared. Instead of large-scale public monuments, he then devoted himself to engraving medals (e.g. for Benedict XV and for the Italian mission in Vienna in 1919) and to designing funeral monuments (examples in Mali Lošinj and Trieste) and portrait busts (of Generals Carlo Caneva and Antonio Baldissera in Udine, sculptures of the War Memorial of Corno di Rosazzo). After all, he had already executed the Bab grave monument in the Döblinger cemetery in Vienna in 1909. He taught in Trieste from 1920 until 1935, at the local school of industrial art, where he had Marcello Mascherini...

These rare and elegantly shaped 1920s Art Deco candlesticks are the work of renowned Danish sculptor and metalworker Just Andersen. Known for his innovative use of materials, Anderse...

Pair of Art Deco Candlesticks by Just Andersen, Model D54 – Denmark, 1930s This refined pair of Art Deco candlesticks, model D54, was designed by renowned Danish designer Just Ander...

Wonderful and very unusual pair of iron candle holders with a gunmetal finish, and decorated with inlays of red copper and yellow brass, in flowing, leaf like motifs. The stems are d...

A pair of Art Deco circa 192o'a French luster-glazed porcelain candlesticks. Measurements: Height of body: 6.5" Diameter of base: 4".