Smoked Glass Fireplace Screen on Art Deco Bronze Supports in the Style of Raymond Subes

This distinguished fireplace screen pairs the sleek material sophistication of a large smoked glass panel with two free-standing bronze supports of extraordinary decorative quality. The glass — a single flat panel of considerable breadth, tinted to a warm grey-brown in the manner of the finest French interior decoration of the 1970s — rests between its supports with an elegant simplicity, its semi-translucent surface absorbing and refracting the ambient light.

The bronze supports are the true artistic distinction of the piece, and bear the closest formal relationship to the vocabulary of Raymond Subes, France’s pre-eminent decorative ironworker and metalsmith of the Art Déco era. Each support is a small sculptural composition: an upright shaft articulated by organic, flowing scrolled forms — paired C-scrolls or lyre-like foliate motifs — that create a sense of botanical energy and controlled natural movement. These forms are executed with the precision and confidence of a trained foundry atelier, their surfaces chased and polished to reveal the warmth of the gilded bronze against a darkened iron base.

The combination of smoked glass and Art Déco bronze sculpture creates a formal dialogue of unusual richness: the cool, smooth expanse of the glass is animated by the warm, intricate texture of the bronze, while the sculptural complexity of the supports is set off by the flat, reflective plane against which they stand. It is an arrangement that achieves its effect through contrast rather than harmony, and succeeds entirely.

At 70 cm wide and 47.5 cm high, this screen is generously proportioned for most fireplace openings of medium or larger scale. It would constitute an object of centrepiece quality in any interior of classical or Art Déco character, serving its practical function while operating simultaneously as a work of decorative sculpture.