Stunning Pair of Grand Tour French Heavy Gauge Patinated Bronze Townley Urns of compact proportions and outstanding quality, after a model by Delafontaine Bronze Foundry 1750-1820.
The main central support is a model of the Townley Vase with Bacchic frieze decorated in high relief depicting classical figures of a dancing and drinking procession of male and female figures ending on a plain circular black polished marble base, early to mid-Nineteenth Century.
Condition: These Urns have been professionally re-bronze patinated, marble is in nice clean condition.
Height: (entire as shown image one) 9" (23m). Diameter: (at base) 4.5" (11.5cm).
Location: Dublin City, Ireland.
Affordable fixed price Worldwide Store to door shipping offered in-house.
NOTE: The Townley Vase is a large Roman marble vase of the second century CE, discovered in 1773 by the Scottish antiquarian and dealer in antiquities Gavin Hamilton in excavating a Roman Villa at Monte Cagnolo, between Genzano and Civitalavinia, near the ancient Lanuvium, in Lazio, southeast of Rome The ovoid vase has volute handles in the manner of a pottery Krater. It is carved with a deep frieze in bas-relief, occupying most of the body, illustrating a Bacchanalian procession. Its name comes from the English collector Charles Townley, who purchased it from Hamilton in 1774 for £250. Townley's collection, long on display in his London house in Park Street, was bought for the British Museum after his death in 1805.
In the nineteenth century it was often imagined that Keates Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) was inspired by the Townley Vase, though modern critics suggest instead that the inspiration was more generic, and may have also owed something to scenes portrayed on William Hamilton’s collection of Greek vases which entered the BM collection at around the same time.
Copies of the Townley Vase were made in plaster and imitation marble throughout the nineteenth century, see final image. At the turn of the twentieth century terracotta versions were made by Manifattura di Signa in Italy. Between the World Wars, table lamps modelled after the Townley Vase identified "cultured" households. This finely cast Pair offered are of superb quality.