Putto Candlestick

Putto on and beneath a vinestock issuing from a waisted, spirally moulded octagonal leaf-form socle mounted on a conforming pad base; the vine trailing through the boy’s hands and above to support a leaf-form candle-sconce.  All in the white, and with dense white body; thick glaze and some crazing. Grey-green translucency. H.8 in (20.3 cm).

Provenance: Taylor Collection; Christie’s South Kensington, November 2007, #24.

This example illustrated Tilley 1957, Pl. LXVII, #203 who, p.127, also draws attention to the similarity of the modelling of the figure and the Bow Mongolian busts, and their similarities of paste and glaze. He reports analysis of the boy (Cavendish/Taylor example) as showing a phosphate content of 14.2 percent, that is equivalent to 35.5 percent bone-ash, and notes the typical Bow ‘craggy blue’ fluorescence of the piece under ultra-violet light.

The pierced, leaf form, drip-pan is an integral part of the model, and not an attachment as was apparently the usual for 18^th century English porcelain, and the whole is glazed without break. The shape of the drip-pan, and the inclusion of a precisely formed, glaze-edged tapering well approximately 2.5 cm in depth at the centre of the pan, may suggest that it was intended for use as a pricket rather than for the attachment of a sconce.

The figure was probably based on a bronze or a French porcelain model after a bronze, and Tilley, 1957 (p. 128), notes ‘some French appearance’ to the boy’s face ‘due to a lack of sharp definition in the pupils of the eyes...’