Offered by Cristina Ortega & Michel Dermigny
This portable candlestick, known as a cellar rat, characteristic of the 19th century, was made of bronze with two patinas: one dark for the figure, the other mercury-gilded for the candleholder and the base. The elongated handle, whose gilding has acquired a patina from use, made it possible to carry the flame from one room to another, a common practice before gas and electric lighting. Here, fantasy and irony dominate: a small, reclining demon with a grimacing face carries the candleholder on his back, his tail curling around the base.
This object is part of a 19th-century decorative tradition marked by a taste for caricature, the strange, and the grotesque. Following the success of Goethe's Faust (translated and staged in France in the 1820s), Mephistopheles became a recurring figure in the decorative arts. Mantelpiece sculptures, inkwells, candlesticks, and candlesticks readily took the form of devils or satyrs. The Second Empire and the first decades of the Third Republic were fond of this type of "diableries": bronze makers, founders, and chasers vied with each other in imagination to produce pieces in which the devil was a player, an accomplice, or a domesticated servant.
Parallels can be found in the productions of houses like Barbedienne or the goldsmith workshops that produced "fantasy objects" intended for a cultured bourgeois clientele, interested in theater and Romantic literature. These small bronze table or mantelpiece figurines also served as curiosities that were popular for conversation. Their distribution also reflected a broader trend: caricatures by Grandville and Daumier, representations of the Sabbath or Hell in popular illustrations, not to mention Gounod's Faust operas (1859), which fueled a shared imagination around the devil's pact.
This example, in its original version (reissues exist) and complete with the demon's tail forming a circle, perfectly illustrates this vein. Between a utilitarian object and a spiritual sculpture, it testifies to this 19th-century taste for domesticated devilry: the devil is no longer a figure of fear, but an ironic and ornamental motif, integrated into the everyday life of bourgeois interiors.
Delevery information :
A special care is given to packing. Bigest pieces are crated.
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