A Victorian gilt-metal and cut-glass forty-light chandelier, mid-19th century, attributed to Perry & Co

Purchased from Stair & Company, London.

Exceptional in its unprecedented forty candle arms, this chandelier is an impressive demonstration of the possibilities of the chandelier form and is almost certainly by Perry & Co., the leading chandelier manufacturer of the mid-nineteenth century.

By the early Victorian period, chandelier design had moved away from the Regency ‘frame’ form with its columnar, almost liquid ‘tent’ of graduated drops that surrounded the internal structure, adopting more layered designs that once again used the central stem as the anchor of the profuse arrangements of arms, swags and drops. Early- to mid-Victorian taste married increasing affluence with a penchant for splendour, leading the ever-more ambitious designs of the leading glass manufacturers to find eager appreciation: a famous example is the dazzling 27-foot-tall Crystal Fountain that was constructed by Osler for the Great Exhibition (see RCIN 2800080). In the home, many-faceted chandeliers remained a practical way of amplifying the lighting power of a limited number of candles – oil lighting was beginning to present an alternative to candlelight but was not ubiquitous and generally not preferred for suspended overhead lights, while electricity would not be widely implemented until the end of the century.

This chandelier’s design, including its distinctive canopy of brass bulrushes or palm leaves, is shared by a group of similar chandeliers that clearly all issue from the same prestigious maker. The closest example in terms of both design and scale is the twenty-one-light chandelier that sold at Christie’s New York, 16th April 2002, lot 275 ($141,500), though the twenty-light example sold at Sotheby’s London, 26th October 2016, lot 1302 (£43,750) also shares many design features with the present example (including the style of the receiver bowl, the ovoid section of the stem with a fluted brass border, and the style of the drip pans).¹

The attribution for chandeliers in this group has generally been to Perry & Co., the name adopted for the firm Parker & Perry in 1820. Parker & Perry had supplied numerous splendid chandeliers to the Prince of Wales during the Regency that are still in the Royal Collection (e.g. RCIN 2719 RCIN 98699) but more relevant here are the chandeliers made for the Duke of Devonshire at Devonshire House during the 1840s, which Martin Mortimer clearly attributes to Perry & Co.²

¹ Other examples of closely comparable chandeliers with bulrush canopies at auction, though with more variance in the design details, include: Sotheby’s London, 19th November 1995, lot 169, Sotheby’s London, 9th July 1999, lot 53 (notable for being the only other example with candles at three height tiers), Sotheby’s New York, 24th May 2007, lot 77, Christie’s London, 20th September 2012, lot 126 and Christie’s London, 29th November 2001, lot 85.

² M. Mortimer, The English Glass Chandelier, Woodbridge, 2000, p.14.