Wall-bracket (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. This particular bracket is made of terracotta and may have been a model for a woodcarver or a bronze caster that was later gilded and mounted for hanging. A dragon with outstretched wings is carved underneath the top, its long tail entwined around openwork C and inverted C-scrolls.

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.