19th Century, French Bronze Planter or Gueridon

Measures: cm W 56 x maximum diameter 51 x H 90. H on the floor of the wide 81 cm

This refined planter was made in France towards the end of the nineteenth century in the style of «Retour d'Egypte».
It consists of a tripod structure in finely chiselled gilded bronze and lacquered in tones. Each leg originates with scroll decorations and phytomorphic elements with golden details, supported by a sphinx with hairstyle, tail and golden wings. This sits on a curvilinear and wavy element decorated with golden ramage and a man’s head with a long beard of classic taste. The legs end with an injured foot and rest on a tripartite base that connects them. In the middle of each leg there is a bronze junction with curls and volutes that converges towards the others in the center, where a vertical element contributes to the momentum and gracefulness of the whole.
The basin of the planter is in lacquered tin, with gold edges and reserves. The rising part of the tub has some holes that allow the breathability of the space.
This tripod is inspired, with variations, to a famous model of the brothers Luigi and Antonio Manfredini, active in Milan at the beginning of the nineteenth century, financed by the viceroy of Italy Eugenio de Beauharnais, adopted son of Napoleon Bonaparte, for the opening of the real manufacture of Eugenia.
The Retour d'Egypte style was widely echoed in France and Europe and originated from General Bonaparte’s military campaign in Egypt in 1799. The fashion of the Egyptians had already in Italy found a previous interpreter in the engraver Giovan Battista Piranesi, but the vast diffusion that also had in the furniture the Egyptian ornament finds the main springboard with the publication in 1802 of the volume of Dominique Vivant Denon, the Egyptologist who followed the future emperor in the land of the pharaohs, diligently copying any archaeological vestiges that it was possible for them to fix on paper. The furnishings were decorated with sphinxes, palmettes, caryatids, Egyptian profiles, not infrequently in symbiosis with Greco-Roman elements.
Very refined, elegant and with a marked decorative character, this tripod is easily inserted in any furnishing context and in any environment. It can be thought of in the center or near a corner, in an entrance or in a corridor, but also in a living room, in a study or in a bedroom. It could also be inserted into a bathroom.
This planter could also be transformed into a gueridon table by resting on top of the tub or replacing it, a glass or marble top.