ATTRIBUTED TO JEAN-JOSEPH SAINT GERMAIN, CIRCA 1775

These beautiful wall-lights, with their central lion masks, acanthus-clad arms and flaming urn finials, display the sober neo-classical vocabulary of the 'goût grec' style prevalent briefly in the early 1760s. Jean-Joseph de Saint Germain (1719-1791), the son of the ébéniste Joseph de Saint Germain, had a workshop in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where he worked as an ouvrier libre. In 1765, he was elected juré of the bronze fondeurs guild for two years. Perhaps best-known for his work in the full-blown Louis XV style, surprisingly little of his work in the early neoclassical style has surfaced, although he remained active well after 1760 and he is also known to have collaborated with ébénistes such as Roger Van Der Cruse, dit Lacroix (RVLC), in providing furniture mounts. His late transition towards neoclassicism was perhaps as a result of a collaboration with his cousin Jean-Louis Prieur (c.1725- c.1785), whose boldly neo-classical designs for bronzes d'ameublement for King Stanislaus II August of Poland, for the royal palace in Warsaw, were enormously influential in promoting the new taste for antiquity.