A Pair of George III gilt carton-pierre girandoles circa 1760

The Collection of the Earl of Rendlesham(?)

Messrs Jeremy Ltd., London

The present pair of girandoles, executed in gilded carton pierre, is a rare example of a medium which, owing to its fragile nature, has rarely survived, particularly in objects of this size. Designed in the rococo manner, each one is centered by a figure of a young boy, one holding a bird cage in one hand and a bird in the other, the other with a basket and a bird, these subjects being common in the romantic and idyllic pastoral scenes of such French artists such as Boucher and Watteau.

A related set of four carton pierre girandoles is shown in Pelham Galleries Catalogue, 1989, these having similarly foliate and flower ornamented conjoined C-scroll frames, each centered by either a figure of a boy playing a tambourine, or a girl with a lute.  As with the present pair, these figures are almost certainly derived from contemporary French engravings.

The provenance as noted by Messrs. Jeremy of the Earl of Rendlesham is somewhat confusing as this is a title which was never granted, although the title of Baron Rendlesham in the peerage of Ireland was granted to Peter Isaac Thellusson (b. 1761) in 1806. The 1st Baron's father, Peter, the son of the resident envoy of Geneva at the court of France, was a banker in Paris before arriving in England in 1762, becoming naturalized in that year.  Through trading chiefly in the West Indies where he acquired large estates, he amassed an immense fortune, acquiring further estates in England at Brodsworth in Yorkshire and Plaistow, near Bromley in Kent, dying there in 1797.  He is somewhat notorious in the laws of England through his will, in which ordered the trustees to accumulate the remainder of his estate through the lives of his children and their heirs at the time of his death. At this time the estate was to be divided amongst his male surviving grandchildren, and if there was no heir the property was to be applied to the extinction of the national debt, a legacy which left behind much confusion and continuing law-suits.

The Brodsworth estate was inherited by Charles Sabine Thelusson in 1859, the present house which is in the Italianate style being erected in the 1860s, at which time all vestiges of the original Georgian mansion appear to have been erased.