Large Empire Style Chandelier in Green Sheet Metal and Gilded Bronze with Palmette Ornaments, French Work, circa 1920

This Empire style chandelier, made in green sheet metal and gilded bronze with ornament and palmette decorations, is a remarkable example of French lighting production of the 1920s in the great tradition of the Napoleonic Empire. The Empire style, which drew its inspiration from Greek and Roman Antiquity as well as the arts of ancient Egypt revealed by Napoleon's campaigns, remained one of the reference styles of French decoration throughout the nineteenth century and was still abundantly revisited at the beginning of the twentieth.

Green sheet metal and gilded bronze constitute the emblematic pair of materials of the Empire style in French lighting production. The sheet metal, lacquered in green — a tone evoking patinated antique bronze — combines with the gilded bronze ornaments — palmettes, acanthus leaves, rosettes — to create an effect of great magnificence. The palmettes, a plant motif inherited from Greek Antiquity and a symbol of victory, constitute the principal ornament of this chandelier, arranged in friezes or radiating patterns according to the tradition of Empire furniture.

A piece of great stature and exceptional refinement, this Empire style green sheet metal and gilded bronze chandelier is destined to illuminate a reception space of character — salon, dining room, entrance hall — to which it will bring the luminous majesty proper to the finest neoclassical interiors.