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A Louis XVI-Style Brass Fireplace Fender, 19th century
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$1425 (list)
item #397169
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A Louis XVI-Style Brass Fireplace Fender, 19th century. The urns with flame finials, the whole draped with swags, with central gallery. This French antique fender measures: height 13 in., width 41 in., depth 8 in. From early times fireplace accessories and furnishings have been objects of decoration. Since at least the 15th century a fireback, a slab of cast iron, protected the back wall of the fireplace from the intense heat; these were usually decorated. After the 19th century the fireback gave way to firebrick in fireplace construction.
Andirons, a pair of horizontal iron bars on short legs and placed parallel to the sides of the fireplace to support burning logs, were used from the Iron Age. A vertical guard bar at the front, placed to prevent logs from rolling into the rooms, is often decorated ornately. (Rear guard bars were in use until the 14th century, when the central open hearth as a mode of heating went out of general use.) The grate, a sort of basket of cast-iron grillwork, came into use in the 11th century and was especially useful for holding coal.
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