How beautiful you are, and slender, warm and elegant, my fireplace of a very distant time, equal to a Martian and not a fireplace....
And how well you were drawn, my mantelpiece, by an architect who evidently knew the right lines and proportions of that Transition (or Regency whatever) style... Had a modern architect designed you, you would have turned out a piece of junk.... And instead, almost a century before the unification of Italy had to come, you can see that architects studied styles, they didn't strike cotidie or skip their studies to go play cards in bars like so many I knew, those, they studied !!!
And it is precisely because sometimes, as in this case, you don't need so many words, that I don't mind proposing to you by means of these poor (but nevertheless fascinating..) pictures, I don't have any better ones, but I am sure they will be enough to put you in touch with people sensitive to the beautiful and the authentic.
Then, if our customers were aware of your rarity, if they really could understand how 18th-century fireplaces are now found almost exclusively with forgers, well, once they see the miserable price we are selling you for, they would flock in fear of being late.
LATE EIGHTEENTH/EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY PERIOD, PARISIAN FIND, PARISIAN DESIGN/DESIGN BUT ITS SCULPTURE IS THE WORK OF BASQUE HANDS IN BURGUNDIAN TERRITORY.... WHAT A STRANGE STORY, HIS, I WILL TRY TO WRITE IT DOWN FOR YOU WHO READ ME:
1) His drawing/design, as I wrote above, is the work of a Parisian architect, who had sensitivity and love for fireplaces, otherwise his pencil would not have been so sweet anda apt.;
2) But then there was the problem of carving it and the French had no suitable sculptors, those few who could have done similar lvors cost too much and so the Maison d'Arts used Basque sculptors, who were cheap, crossed the Pyrenees and came as far as Burgundy (there were the quarries of this fantasticand refined stone) to stay there for the whole season, from April to September they worked outdoors, on the sides of the quarries themselves;
3) The various parts of the fireplace (in the case of ours there are four, two legs, a front and a floor) were then taken to the commissioning Maison who would then assemble these parts at their client's home..
For a long time these fireplaces were made almost exclusively for Parisian customers, so much so that they were called “Parisienne,” but then, as of the postwar period, they became very popular in “Lower France” (mostly on the CÔTE D'AZUR), so much so that they also took the name “Provençal.”
They are no longer to be found, and this is a little regrettable because personally I am a great admirer of them; I find them elegant, warm, “soft,” as it were, almost friendly. In short, not being able to make all the other fireplaces in our warehouse jealous, I will just say that these “Provençals” to me are very… NICE.
