A Pair of George II Silver Candlesticks, Paul de Lamerie, London, 1737

Sotheby's, London, 6th November 1997, lot 163

The Chen Collection, sold

Lyon & Turnbull, Edinburgh, 23 November 2008, lot 206

The flower crest is that of Janssen, a family noted for their connoisseurship of silver. The likely patron for the original set of four candlesticks is Sir Theodore Janssen (1658-1748), a Dutch merchant who arrived England c. 1680 and was a founder and director of the Bank of England. Created a baronet in 1714, he was a noted financier supposedly worth 300,000 pounds. Implicated in the South Sea Bubble scandal, he was heavily fined by the House of Commons committee in 1721. His son Stephen Theodore Janssen was also based in London and may also have commissioned these, but sons Robert and Henry moved to Paris, where the latter is believed to have been the original patron of the important silver by Thomas Germain and others known to history as the Penthièvre-Orléans Service.

The matching candlesticks from the original set of four were sold Christie's New York, 19th October 2004, lot 1062. A set of four salts by Lamerie engraved with the same crest are in the Farrer Collection at the Ashmolean Museum (Illus. Susan Hare, Paul de Lamerie, no. 78, p.122).

The earliest examples of this Lamerie design were for Sir Robert Walpole in 1731, and support unmarked four-light tops (Schroder, The Gilbert Collection of Gold and Silver, 1988, pp. 204-206, cat. no. 50). Six candlesticks with two candelabrum branches of 1737 are at Woburn Abbey. Two sets of four sticks of 1737 and 1738 are in the Clark Art Institute (Wees, English, Irish, and Scottish Silver at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1997, cat. no. 375 and 376, with a note on the known versions of the model).