A pair oflate 17th/early 18th century gilt-bronze chenets

Beautiful and rare pair of gilt bronze andirons from the Louis XIV period, late 17th/early 18th century, depicting a couple of children tending the hearth. The boy is attentive to the embers, his bellows in his left hand; the young girl, ready for action, holds a flaming torch in her right hand. Both are dressed in antique-style draperies; seated three-quarters of the way up, their heads turned towards the hearth, they watch over the hearth conscientiously. Each of them rests on a four-legged console base, decorated with gadroons and mantling at the top, a leafy reserve from which a woman's mask emerges to center the face. The four corners are provided with an applique reinforcement, each topped with a foliate spandrel, gadrooned and finished in the lower part with a deer hoof mounted with stylized acanthus leaves.
The sculpture of this pair of andirons is full of vigor, strength and power, but here moderated by a new trend marked by the combined alchemy of decorative ornaments that combines the style known as : Louis-Quatorzian style, characterized by cardinal virtues such as pure classicism, rigorous balance full of strength, symmetry and equilibrium, but balanced here by the more flexible and varied ornamentalism of the early 18th century, very much in vogue in French decorative art from the end of the great century to the beginnings of the Enlightenment, which led to the Regence style.

Dimensions; height 27.4cm, width 16.2cm, depth 12cm.