A French Giltwood Tripod Vase Stand with Black Marble Top

#18385: A French Giltwood Tripod Vase Stand with Black Marble Top
French, Late 19th Century
Height 49cm, width 60cm, depth 60cm; top: diameter 37cm

This Louis XVI-style vase stand is raised on three legs sheathed in acanthus and ending in lion's-paw feet, its body hung with garlands beneath a circular top. It is carved throughout and finished to the same standard on every side.
The top, of dark marble streaked with white, is a replacement and sits within a plain rounded rim. Beneath it, a frieze of short, round-ended flutes gives way to a torus wound with ribbon. At three points the ribbon gathers into a bow above a tight knot, and from each knot garlands of olive foliage studded with berries loop outwards to the neighbouring legs. The gadrooned lower body tapers to a pendant finial wrapped in acanthus.
Each leg is headed by a square die centred by a four-petalled patera, its sides recessed with plain panels. Above each die, a cluster of acanthus climbs to the rim and curls over at the tip. The legs are clothed in layered acanthus foliage and terminate in lion's-paw feet.
Ribbon bows, leafy garlands, fluted friezes and dies carved with paterae belong to the decorative repertoire of Louis XVI's reign (1774–1792), a style that enjoyed a sustained revival in France from the Second Empire onwards. The three-legged form with animal-paw feet looks further back, to the bronze stands of Roman antiquity known from the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which 18th-century designers studied closely and adapted into the tripod stand known in France as the athénienne.
Standing free of the wall, the stand can support a vase, urn or jardinière, or serve as an occasional table.
$6,750