Large Pair of Late 18th-Century Gilt-Gesso Wall Reflectors with Romayne-Style Portrait Medallions

This pair of three-light wall reflectors is built for drama. Each backplate is a large cartouche of gilt gesso with a shell cresting at the top, filled with fleshy acanthus, strapwork and scrolling foliage in the full-blooded Baroque manner. Everything is modelled in bold relief, so that candlelight catches on every ridge and hollow. Three scrolling candle arms spring from the base of each cartouche, each ending in a drip pan and a turned candle nozzle.

At the centre of each sits an oval portrait medallion: a gentleman on one, a lady on the other. Each bust is modelled in relief and picked out in gilt against a dark ground. He wears long curling hair and a lace collar; she has her hair dressed high. The idea has a long ancestry. The portrait head set within a medallion goes back to Roman coins and gems. It was revived across Renaissance Europe and gave rise to the Romayne panels of the early sixteenth century, where carved heads in roundels decorated English and Flemish oak panelling and furniture.

Here the device is set within the rich ornament of the Baroque. Both the ornament and the sitters’ dress look back to the decades around 1700, which gives the pair a deliberately retrospective character. That is typical of provincial Continental workshops, which held on to the grand manner long after metropolitan taste had moved on. The two faces were plainly made as a pair, in the long tradition of companion portraits, and they work together as an elegant composition across a chimneypiece, a doorway or a pier wall.

Before gas and electric light, candlelight was precious, and the gilded backplate of a reflector doubled the light of every candle while making a spectacle of the light itself. These remain richly decorative and deeply atmospheric objects today. Hung by candlelight they come fully alive, and they are equally at home in a period house, alongside early oak and Romayne panelling, or as a striking accent in a pared-back modern interior.

Provenance: Continental, probably German. Earlier ownership unknown. 

Material: Carved and gilt gesso on a wooden core, with gilt candle arms, drip pans and nozzles.

Condition: Good for age. The gilding is mellowed and rubbed to the high points, with some areas of later regilding and touching-in. There are minor losses and chips to the gesso, consistent with age. The arms appear sound. Not wired; sold for candle use only. Please refer to the images.

Dimensions (each): Height 24 in (61 cm), width 21¼ in (54 cm), depth 13 in (33 cm)