A German gilt-bronze-mounted twelve-light crystal chandelier, circa 1800, attributed to Werner & Mieth

Bruun Rasmussen, 1 June 2018, lot 939 (250,000 DKK).

This chandelier has many of the hallmarks of pieces made in Berlin by Werner & Mieth around the turn of the nineteenth century. Many of these went to the Prussian royal palaces, as explored extensively by Käthe Klappenbach in her catalogue for the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation.¹ Numerous comparable chandeliers are pictured between pages 269 and 285, with the most notable cat.84: this example, which hangs in the Etruscan Room (318) of Charlottenburg Palace, is the only other example to have a main gallery formed of four concave curves, as opposed to the more conventional, ring-form shape. The design of the present example remains unusual in the addition of the crescent moon mounts and the domed form of the corona. The inverted C-form arrangement of drops is also rare, since they are usually in a swag-like arrangement of the opposite orientation.

Chandeliers of this type have appeared at auction at Stair, 17 June 2025, lot 29 (an eighteen-light example, $52,500), Christie's New York, 5 April 2022, lot 181 (also an eighteen-light example, $10,080) and Sotheby's New York, 3 February 2024, lot 1157 (a twelve-light example, $6,985).

¹ K. Klappenbach, Kronleuchter, mit Behang aus Bergkristall und Glas sowie Glasarmkronleuchter bis 1810, Berlin, 2001.