Openwork brass/bronze two-tier flower stand, rocaille style (5864)

Pierced Brass Two-Tier Plant Stand — A Golden Accent in the Rococo Taste

Dimensions:
Height — 67 cm
Width — 33.5 cm

This refined brass plant stand is an airy, lace-like piece, where golden shimmering metal meets rocaille lightness. Two openwork shelves are cast like pierced lace: a fan or sun-wheel at the centre, surrounded by a billowing pattern of flowers, leaves and volutes through which light flows. The shelves are held by three slender, gracefully curved legs worked as twisting vines with cast roses and leaves — slim, almost nature-made lines ending in expressive feet.

The material is golden shimmering metal (brass/bronze) with a warm, yellowish glow that lifts every detail of the openwork casting. Light slides through the piercings and casts fine shadows — the surface is alive and shifts from matte to bright gold as one moves around it.

Style and period. By its openwork casting, rocaille pattern and vine legs, the stand is made in the Neo-Rococo / Historicist taste, favoured across Europe for displaying decorative plants, pots and small precious objects in a salon or boudoir.

A splendid stand for a houseplant, a flowerpot, a small sculpture or display, its two tiers allow a stepped composition. Its golden shimmering surface sits especially beautifully in a French, romantic or eclectic interior and stands out against a dark or deep-coloured wall. Condition is good for age, with natural patina to the metal and light rub to the raised points in places, lending the gold a warm, living character (see photos). The construction is stable.

Belle Époque snapshot: Robert de Montesquiou (Robert de Montesquiou) entered his Paris apartment by the Bois de Boulogne, where every object had been chosen with a poet’s eye, and set a single orchid in a glass vessel on the upper shelf of the golden stand. His fingers slid over the cool, openwork metal — cold gold beneath his fingertips, fine as lace. The room smelled of wax, flowers and some distant incense, and the afternoon light slowly crossed the room. This was that aesthete’s moment when one perfectly placed object said more than a whole room; and the golden stand, with its single flower, reigned over the silence like a little throne.