Potpourri vase with lid. Louis XIV style. France, second half of the nineteenth century

Potpourri vase with lid. Louis XIV style. France, second half of the nineteenth century.
Bronze and porphyry.
Measurements: 37 x 25 cm.

Porphyry vase with globular body and molded lid, with gilded bronze applications. Four sculptures of laughing children mounted on dolphins function as sumptuous gilded bronze feet, completed with vegetal festoons. An openwork frieze in gilded bronze borders the vessel and is ornamented with fruity highlights, also in bronze. The knob of the lid is decorated with foliage. The piece dates from the nineteenth century, a period in which styles of the past are recovered in search of stylistic or historicist hybridizations. In this case, it evokes the Louis XIV style and its interest in adopting Greco-Roman motifs filtered by nineteenth-century courtly taste.