Vintage Art Nouveau Gilt Brass Candlestick with Bobeche, c. 1950–1980

The Piece

A small gilt brass candlestick modelled all over in Art Nouveau relief, the kind of object that does more on a shelf than its size suggests.

The cup is a deep tapered bowl standing on a short waist. Around the outside it carries a repeating fan, a palmette opening in ribbed segments with a leaf curling away on either side, and inside it is turned plain and polished with a short cylindrical socket standing in the floor to take the candle. The wide cup catches the wax that the socket lets run.

Below it sits the bobeche, a separate eight lobed disc cut like a flower and ribbed in radiating lines from the centre out to each petal tip, threaded onto the stem so it reads as a collar rather than an afterthought.

The foot is the best of it. The stem breaks out of the bobeche and flares downward in fluted strands that spread across a low domed base, and between them the casting carries the Art Nouveau motif proper. Large teardrop pods, each one held in a pair of sinuous stems that loop, cross and run back on themselves in the whiplash line the style is named for. The outline of the base follows the design rather than staying round, waving gently in and out where the pods meet.

The gilding is warm and even across the whole piece, bright on the turned rim and softer in the cast recesses. The underside is covered edge to edge in felt, cut to follow the waving outline of the base, so it sits on furniture without marking it.

History & Provenance

The design is Art Nouveau in its proper vocabulary. The whiplash stem, the seed pod held in a curve rather than presented square, the base that refuses a circle and follows its own ornament, and the fluted foot that grows out of the stem like a root system are all the language the movement built between about 1895 and the First World War. Nothing about the drawing is generic, and whoever modelled this had looked at the real thing.

The manufacture is a different question, and the honest reading is that it is later than the design. Three things point that way. The relief is soft edged and rounded rather than chased sharp after casting, with small pits in the surface of the foot, which is what a casting taken from another casting looks like. The bobeche is thin, stamped and cut rather than spun or cast. And the gilding is unbroken, sitting as brightly in the recesses as on the high points, with no wear through at the base rim or the cup lip where a century of handling would have taken it off first.

On that evidence it is offered as c. 1950 to 1980, a revival piece rather than a period one, made when Art Nouveau came back into fashion and decorative brass was being cast in volume for the furnishing trade. It is the honest reading of what is visible and the listing does not claim more.

Four things would settle it and could move the date earlier. Whether a maker's mark, a foundry mark or a stamped country of origin survives under the felt. Whether the base is a solid casting or spun from sheet. Whether the gilding wears through to yellow brass or to a white metal, which would mean plated spelter rather than brass. And the weight in the hand, since period castings of this form are noticeably heavier than their reproductions.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Small brass on a shelf is a workhorse. At five inches this fits on a mantel, a bookshelf, a bathroom counter or a dining table without competing with anything, and the warm gilt does what brass is meant to do in a room, which is throw a bit of light back at you in the corners where nothing else does.

The relief is what separates it from the field. Most small candlesticks are turned and plain because turning is cheap, and a cast piece with a modelled foot and a modelled cup reads as an object rather than a fitting. Photographed on a stack of books or beside a clock it holds its own.

It also takes a real candle rather than a tealight, which is worth saying. The socket is a proper one and the wide cup underneath means the wax goes where it should instead of down the stem and onto the furniture.