Madame de Pompadour’s £1m wall lights discovered in Yorkshire hotel

 

‘It’s been a lot of detective work’: Madame de Pompadour’s £1m wall lights discovered in Yorkshire hotel

 

Four gilt-bronze sconces that lit up home of Louis XV’s mistress are set to go on sale at Sotheby’s in December

 

Kim Willsher in Paris

Sun 24 Nov 2024 07.00 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/24/its-been-a-lot-of-detective-work-madame-de-pompadours-1m-wall-lights-discovered-in-yorkshire-hotel

 

For almost 140 years, four massive gilt-bronze wall lights have hung in the 18th-century drawing room at Swinton Castle in Yorkshire, now an opulent luxury hotel.

 

Guests will almost certainly have noticed the one metre-high rococo appliques with their entwined branches decorated with leaves, berries and cherubim, and passed them off as impressive reproductions of more valuable original works.

 

“They would have known they were good, but not how good,” said João Magalhães, a French and Italian furniture specialist. Now, auction house Sotheby’s believes it has uncovered missing treasure after tracing the lights’ history from the grand salon of French king Louis XV’s mistress Madame de Pompadour, through generations of European aristocracy.

 

Magalhães believes the appliques were created by master sculptor Jacques Caffieri. He linked them to two chandeliers made by the artisan who was attached to the French royal household in the 18th century, bearing the same decoration and acquired by de Pompadour.

 

Although the four wall lights at Swinton are not signed, they bear all the stylistic hallmarks of Caffieri’s work. After nine months scouring French sale receipts and inventory records, Magalhães says he has traced the sconces back to Madame de Pompadour’s homes, first at the Versailles Palace, and then at the Château de Crécy at Dreux, west of Paris, a beautiful estate gifted by the king.

 

“It has been a lot of detective work and a little supposition based on facts. We know they are very similar to the chandeliers and we know the chandeliers were moved back and forth with four wall lights. It is difficult to see how the lights we have are not the same lights in the inventories,” Magalhães told the Observer.

 

Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, the Marquise of Pompadour – known as Madame de Pompadour – was the official chief mistress of Louis XV as well as his aide and adviser. She was a major political figure in the royal court at Versailles and patron of the decorative arts and architecture, sponsoring many Enlightenment philosophers and writers, including Voltaire. She played a central role in making Paris the European capital of taste and culture, and established the Sèvres porcelain factory, celebrated across the continent.

 

Even after her sexual relationship with the king ended and he took younger mistresses, Louis XV remained devoted to her through the ill health of her later years until her death from tuberculosis aged 42 in 1764.

 

De Pompadour was an enthusiastic proponent of the extremely ornamental and dramatic rococo style, also known as late baroque, that emerged in France in the 1730s, and she filled the 15 residences she owned with such artefacts and furnishings.

 

At the Château de Crécy, she could escape the pressures of the royal court and host long visits from the king as well as intellectuals, writers and artists. Her Grand Salon d’Assemblée was more than 16m long and 8.5m wide, requiring furnishings that measured up to its impressive size.

 

“Madame de Pompadour’s grand salon at Crecy was dedicated to the arts, and we know she decorated the salon in rococo style. Unfortunately, very few pieces from this salon have survived,” Magalhães said.

 

In 1757, de Pompadour sold the Château de Crécy and its contents to the Duc de Penthièvre, the grandson of King Louis XIV known for his vast wealth, philanthropy and involvement in French naval affairs. De Penthiève’s properties and belongings were seized during the 1789 revolution. All trace of the wall lights was lost until they reappeared on the other side of the Channel in 1844 in the South Drawing Room of the 2nd Earl of Lonsdale’s home in London.

 

Lonsdale, a prolific buyer of French furniture and Sèvres porcelain, was a close friend of British king George IV. Around 1887, the lights were sold at auction for £1,280 and relocated to the 200-acre Swinton estate, north of Leeds, where they have remained, one pair placed either side of the drawing room fireplace.

 

The wall lights, estimated at up to £1m, will be sold at Sotheby’s annual Treasures auction in London on 4 December.

 

“Objects like this don’t come around every month. They are very beautiful, absolutely amazing; monumental in terms of their scale, quality and the boldness of design,” Magalhães said.

 

“They scream of a great patron of the arts, and Madame de Pompadour was certainly that.”

 

“We see some extraordinary things in this business, but every now and again there is something that just stops you in your tracks. Seeing these wall lights was one such moment.”

Pair of 1752 gilt-bronze andirons by Caffieri, in the Cleveland Museum of Art

Jacques Caffieri (25 August 1678, Paris – 25 November 1755, Paris) was a French sculptor, working for the most part in bronze.

 

Jacques Caffiéri was the fifth son of Philippe Caffieri (1634-1716), the founder of this family of artists. Jacques was received a maître fondeur-ciseleur by 1715, the date of his first known work, a design for a pall for the Corporation des Fondeurs-Ciseleurs, one of two Parisian guilds that oversaw works cast in metal, from full-scale sculptures to gilt-bronze furniture mounts, wall-lights and candlesticks. As fondeurs-ciseleurs, "casters and finishers", the renown of the Caffieri family has centred on Jacques, though later it is not easy to distinguish between Jacques' work and that of Jacques' son, the younger Philippe (1714–1777).

 

Caffieri was attached as fondeur-ciseleur to the Bâtiments du Roi in 1736. A large proportion of his brilliant achievement as a designer and chaser in bronze and other metals was executed for the crown at Versailles, Fontainebleau, Marly, Compiègne, Choisy and the Château de La Muette, and the crown, ever in his debt, still owed him money at his death. Philippe and his son Jacques undoubtedly worked together in the Appartement du Dauphin at Versailles, and although much of their contribution has disappeared, the gilt-bronze decorations of the marble chimney-piece still remain. They belong to the best of full-blown Rococo style; vigorous and graceful in design, they are executed with splendid skill.

 

After the elder Philippe's death in 1716, Jacques continued to work for the crown, but had many private clients. From the Caffieri workshop in rue des Canettes came an amazing amount of work, chiefly in the shape of those gilt-bronze furniture mounts which adorned furniture by the best ébénistes of Paris. Little of his achievement was ordinary; an astonishingly large proportion of it is famous. In the Wallace Collection, London,[1] is the royal commode delivered by Antoine-Robert Gaudreau, ébéniste du Roi, in 1739 for Louis XV's bedchamber at Versailles: it is richly mounted with an integrated series of corner mounts, chutes and sabots, and the drawer-fronts and a single composition into which the handles are fully integrated. It must have been the result of close cooperation between Caffiéri and Gaudreau, who was responsible for the veneered carcase. In 1747 Caffiéri supplied gilt-bronze mounts for the marble chimneypiece in the Dauphin's bedroom at Versailles. Caffieri also produced gilt-bronze cases for clocks, both mantel clocks and the cartel clocks that combined clock and bracket in one unified design, to be mounted on a wall. A detailed inventory of the Caffieri workshop made in 1747 enables scholars to identify some unsigned clockcases from the workshop: a fully Rococo cartel clock with a movement by Julien Le Roy is at the Getty Museum: it is inscribed fait par Caffiery in a cartouche below the dial.

 

In 1740, Caffieri's wife purchased a royal privilege, which allowed the Caffieri workshop to gild bronze as well as cast it within the same workshop; ordinarily the processes were divided between two Parisian corporations, jealous of their jurisdictions, the fondeurs-ciseleurs and the ciseleurs-doreurs.

 

His signature incised in gilt-bronze kept his name alive in the nineteenth century and gained him an entry in Encyclopædia Britannica 1911, though the extreme Rococo style of which he was a consummate master laid his work open to disapproving commentary. Two monumental gilt-bronze chandeliers in the Wallace Collection, London, bear his signature; one of them was a wedding present from Louis XV to Louise-Elisabeth of France in 1739; the other is signed and dated 1751. The famous astronomical clock made by C.-S. Passement and Dauthiau for Louis XV, 1749–1753, is housed in a Rococo case signed by Caffieri. Another clock, with a movement by Balthasar Martinot in an extreme Rococo style gilt-bronze case, belongs to the Duke of Buccleuch, at Boughton House A pair of fire-dogs signed and dated 1752 is in the Cleveland Museum of Art Two large gilt-bronze mirror-frames by Caffieri, to a design by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, were intended as a gift to the Sultan of Turkey; the price was an astonishing 24,982 livres.

 

He made a great cross and six candlesticks for the high altar of Notre-Dame de Paris, which disappeared in the French Revolution, but similar work for Bayeux Cathedral still exists. A wonderful enamelled toilet set which he executed for the Princess of Asturias has also disappeared.

 

In 1737 and 1735 respectively, Jacques Caffieri cast the busts of Jean Victor de Besenval de Brunstatt (1671–1736) and of his late father, Jean Victor Pierre Joseph Besenval (1638–1713). The busts, at least one of which was part of the collection of Pierre Victor, Baron de Besenval de Brunstatt, according to Louis Abel de Bonafous, Abbé de Fontenay (1737–1806), it was the bust that showed the baron's father, Jean Victor de Besenval de Brunstatt, and which the baron kept in his cabinet at the Hôtel de Besenval, were both shown at the exhibition L’Art Français sous Louis XIV et sous Louis XV, which was held in Paris in 1888.