Console (console d'applique)

Small wall-mounted brackets (consoles d’applique) which held porcelain vases, clocks, or candelabra, usually harmonized with the interior decoration of a room. Featuring a winged and gilded dragon among green painted palm leaves, it is difficult to attribute the design of this bracket to a particular artist. Eighteenth-century designers who favored dragon motifs include Jean-Bernard-Honoré Turreau, known as Toro, Alexis Peyrotte, and Nicolas Pineau.

This bracket was part of the model collection of woodwork, paneling and seat furniture of Maison Leys, a successful decorating business, located at the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. Since 1885 the business was directed by Georges Hoentschel who installed the collection in 1903 in a museum-like display at Boulevard Flandrin, Paris. Three years later, Hoentschel sold the collection to J. Pierpont Morgan who gave the panels with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.