Pair of Sconces
Pierre Doublet · 1669-1670
Each of these silver wall lights is a shaped back plate worked in high relief with large leafy scrolls and three open flowers, framing a plain oval medallion on which a small applied figure, probably an allegory of Victory, sits on a trophy of arms. From the bottom of each plate springs a curved arm with leaf ornament ending in a candle socket sheathed in leaves. Turn to the marks: the maker's punch shows a crowned fleur-de-lis with the letters P and D separated by a tulip, for Pierre Doublet, and the Paris warden's mark is the letter A used from June sixteen sixty-nine to July sixteen seventy. Two English crests engraved later, a stag for the Lonsdale family and a falcon rising from a tree trunk for the Heywoods, record their owners across the Channel.
Silver from the first decades of Louis the Fourteenth's reign is extremely rare, because the king's financial edicts of sixteen eighty-nine and seventeen hundred and nine sent most of it to the melting pot. Pieces that had left France survived. These sconces belonged to Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Heywood-Lonsdale and were sold at Christie's in London in June nineteen fifty-six, when the Louvre bought them.
Did You Know? French silver of this date mostly survives only because it left the country before Louis XIV ordered his subjects' plate melted down.
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