Perfume vase, 1770-71 (blue john, gilt bronze, glass & tortoiseshell)

These vases almost certainly formed part of the chimney garniture supplied by Boulton for Queen Charlotte’s use at Buckingham House. Boulton’s first design was probably modified by Chambers to include features such as the grotesque masks on the body, the recumbent sphinxes and the rinceaux (scrolling foliage) on the bases. The use of sphinxes in this manner may have been influenced by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s design for a plate-warmer at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire of 1760, although Chambers himself drew sphinxes when in Paris and Rome in the 1750s. That the visit to Buckingham House in February 1770 - for which, according to Josiah Wedgwood, Boulton had been ‘scheming’ for over a year - was a success can be judged by the fact that two years later Boulton sold the King ‘a pair of cassoletts, a Titus, a Venus clock and some other things’.