Lot n° 578
Estimation :
3000 - 5000
EUR
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Rare pair of lampshades for - Lot 578
Rare pair of lampshades for
COUPOLE LAMPS in cut-out and gilded lacquered sheet metal decorated with large palmettes and an openwork frieze inscribed: Par brevet d'invention et de perfection Vivien à Paris.
H.: 40 cm - D.: 59 cm
Circa 1811 / 15 (oxidation, missing lacquer)
L. Vivien, tinsmith-lampmaker, located at 43, place de Saint -Germain-l'Auxerrois in
Paris and 26, rue Esprit des Lois in Bordeaux, filed a patent on September 6, 1811 for lighting devices called lampes à coupole et réverbère à mèche plate unique.
In 1818, Vivien, lamp maker in Paris, was entrusted with the repair of the chandelier in Bordeaux's Grand Théâtre. He asked 3,000 francs for an eighty-spout chandelier in the same shape as the one in the Salle Feydeau.
(Theaters in Bordeaux from 1800 to 1830. Madeleine
Brun, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde, 1929).
Vivien was also responsible for the public lighting system in Paris in the 19th century:
On February 17, 1821, a new lighting system invented by a tinsmith-lamp maker named Vivien was tested in the Place du Louvre, simply by applying Argand's air current to the tubes carrying the lit wick. All the streetlamps in Paris were renewed on a uniform model. These were the ones that lasted until the popularization of gas lighting; we knew them, and without much difficulty we could still see some, as they have almost all disappeared.
They swung over the streams, which then flowed in the middle of public thoroughfares. Men recruited by the Prefecture of Police, to which the Paris lighting service belonged until the decree of October 10, 1859, which transferred it to the Prefecture of the Seine, and known as the "allumeurs", were exclusively in charge of looking after the streetlamps.
Protected by a mop to protect their clothes from oil stains, wearing very flat hats and carrying a large zinc box containing their essential utensils, they opened the lock that closed the iron tube where the suspension rope slid. The lamppost descended with an unpleasant noise and reached man-height.
We then cleaned it, scrubbed the reflector plate, wiped the glasses, cut the wick and poured a ration of turnip or rapeseed oil into the container; then every evening, at dusk, we lit them. It was dirty, slow and very inconvenient for the cars, which had to wait until the lantern's grooming was complete.
(Maxime Du Camp, L'éclairage à Paris, Revue des Deux
Mondes, 1873, tome 105, p 775 - 776-)
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