Posted 9 years ago
capekal
(1 item)
53'' tall with 4ft 3in purchased it a estate sale for nothing but this lamp seem to speak to me and I had to have it ...I would like to know how old it is tho??? its a metal painted L & f Moreau lamp
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The L&F M .... I can make out .... but the rest of it was s difficult to see from the photo. Can you see better the letters after the M ?
Is it porcelain or is it cold painted metal?
the lamp is painted metal and its a L & F Moreau lamp with the collection stamp on It
Got it !!!
L & F Moreau.
There's one here with some history of the brothers Moreau.
The sculpture was made by two brothers, Louis Auguste and Hippolyte Francois Moreau, part of the Moreau family of sculptors from Dijon, France (yes, also famous for the mustard). Louis worked in bronze and metal sculpture while Francois was a painter and sculptor. They collaborated on many, many highly ornate and detailed decorative pieces in the Art Nouveau era, mostly lamps and clocks, and signed their pieces “L & F Moreau”.
https://bernadettestoday.wordpress.com/tag/l-f-moreau/
These ladies are proclaiming the truth, I’m sure, with the long traditional court trumpet, those clingy, flowing dresses and one with a laurel wreath on her head the other wings and holding two laurel wreaths. I didn’t photograph the whole thing because I wanted to be able to see the tablet with the phrase, plus it just gets lost with everything else on the table.
it seems the brothers lived until 1930 but the other brother died in 1919 meaning to me that the lamp was signed by both so I am going to believe that it pre 1919 ??i am just guessing and that passage you posted for me I did read before ...but I whish their was a date that it was manufactured on I could rely on ??
Maybe you've seen this article too ?
http://www.mysculpturesgallery.com/who-were-the-moreau-sculptors-291.html
I read that article also and it did state that they did continue to produce those lamps even after the brothers died....... which is very difficult to find out how actually old the lamp is very frustrating to put a date on this item .. I wanted to put the lamp for auction but its hard to find out how old it really is
.Dooooh
These were made in the 1960's and forward to 70's and I have had their old ones also. Made in pairs mainly. The painted ones were not made until the molds were unearthed by the J. B. Hirsch company who put together the collection francais all the way up to 1981. They revived these spelter statues and did quite a number of them. Remember seeing them for the first time in the 1980's at some of the antique shows I dealt at. I have a lot of the information from author Peter Berman who knew the Hirsch brothers and did more than a number of their foundry's work in his articles and was a fan of theirs, as they were friends and colleagues of each other. So many of the old statues were made from original molds they had knowledge of and dug up from the bronze foundries floors after the 2nd World War. Unfortunately after 1982 the Hirsch foundry and Peter Berman, who both had great knowledge, are gone. These pairs they had also done in just a white paint finish also. There was a great influx in the 60's to 70's in statues done in white chalk ware from Italy. These lamps were a different material, but popular during that time also.
Some more info from another website:
J.B. Hirsch Company
The JB Hirsch story begins in 1907 with the New York Art Bronze Works in Manhattan’s lower east side. The founder of the company, Romanian metalsmith, Joseph B. Hirsch,
began importing pieces directly from French foundries. Around that period, foundries with close ties to the talented artists and sculptors of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, began producing their now famous works in “French Bronze.” Some of the finest talent throughout Europe trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, exhibiting their works at the Salon de Artistes and other great Salons in Paris, the center of the art world.
Between the wars, during the 1920s and 1930s, an entirely new modern style of decorative art emerged, using a combination of bronze and ivory. With the ban of ivory in the early 1930s, ivorine or celluloid (predecessor of plastic) was used in its place. The ivory or ivorine representing exposed flesh and the bronze or spelter representing clothing. The combination of “French Bronze” (spelter) and ivory or ivorine were fully exploited during the Deco period using events of discovery (opening of King Tut’s Tomb in the 1920s), celebrities, athletes (1936 Olympics), children, the fashions and costumes of the period by Erte and Gerdago, and dancers from the Ballet Russe,
After World War I, when the French occupation closed one of Hirsch’s primary suppliers, he went to Paris and purchased that company’s molds to begin his own casting foundry. With the acquisitions of additional molds from French, German and Italian foundries, Hirsch was able to put together the finest and rarest collection of Beaux Arts, Nouveau and Deco sculptural molds in the world.
During World War II, the French foundries were again prohibited from using metal for statues. To prevent the valuable sculptural art from being destroyed by marauding armies, the molds were broken up, the pieces scattered, buried under factory floors,
and hidden in house cellars. Most French foundries remained closed after World War II, and the molds remained hidden.
In 1948, J.B. Hirsch’s son, Abraham, heard of their existence, and planned “archaeological expeditions” to France to search for the buried mold fragments. Between 1948 and 1963 Abraham Hirsch was able to piece together over 200 objects and acquire the molds from 15 “French Bronze” foundries. Abraham’s son, Stanley was put in charge of reassembling exhumed molds that arrived in pieces. After attending a symposium on the Beaux Arts by the NY Metropolitan Museum of Arts, Stanley Hirsch discovered he was in possession of the original molds from which the displayed pieces were cast. Putting together the puzzle of scrambled parts is still an ongoing process.
Apparently these "exemplaires" as Peter Berman called them were not reproductions but a new meaning because they were made from the original molds. In the early 2000's there was some new work done with these molds again trying to revive the Hirsch family's work. here is one website of about 4 that agrees with me in the years your lamps were being made which is mid 1960's:
http://abeautifulfindllc.blogspot.ca/2012/03/louis-francoise-moreau-lamps.html