Pair of « Dolphins » Torcheres holders, France, Circa 1860

Provenance : Île-de-France Castle

Exceptional pair of Regence style carved and giltwood torcheres holders. The console shaft around which a dolphin is wrapped is richly decorated with leafy scrolls, shells, floral falls and a woman mask. It supports a circular top with palmette and acanthus, surrounded by a frieze of eggs.
The whole rests on a tripod base decorated with friezes of eggs and foliage, decorated with three dolphins leaning against a lambrequin and ending with six leafy feet.

According to the definition of the Dictionary of the Academy, in 1696, the torchère is a “kind of small pedestal table with a high shaft on which one places a torch, a candelabra, candles”.
In the last years of the 17th and 18th centuries, this piece of furniture was particularly appreciated for supporting candelabras and girandoles made of glass or rock crystal intended to illuminate interiors as well as sumptuous galleries such as the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles for which two models of twelve copies each were delivered in 1769, in anticipation of the marriage of the Dauphin: one with figures of children sculpted by François Toussaint Foliot ; the other with a figure of a woman sculpted by Pierre-Edmé Babel after the drawings of Jacques Gonduin, architect of the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne.