Stock No: 12557

A PERIOD 18th CENTURY GEORGE III IRISH NEO CLASSICAL FIREPLACE in the manner of Sir Henry Cheere, in white Statuary marble inlaid with Sicilian Jasper panels on the frieze and jambs.

The breakfront shelf with bead and reel detail over a frieze inlaid with prettily figured Jasper / Diaspora and centred by a large tablet carved in high relief depicting a rural scene of a ploughboy with shire horses and a hound evoking the history of Ceres as harvest deity of Peace and Plenty. It is flanked by two carved sphinx on the endblocks supported on tapering plinths carved with ribboned interwoven bellflowers. English 1770.

NOTE : A similar but wider tablet is on a chimneypiece in featured in " English Chimneypieces " published in 1927 by Guy Cadogan Rotheray; on another chimneypiece featured in a Litchfield & Co advertisement in The Connoisseur Magazine Sept 1906 and on a chimneypiece at Castletown, Co. Kilkenny (The Georgian Society Records of eighteenth-Century Domestic Architecture and Decoration in Ireland, vol.5, Dublin, 1913, pl.59)... images below.

Link to a section showing full range of similar/related neo-classical chimneypieces