Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 April 1901 — CANDLELIGHT IN VOGUE. [ARTICLE]

CANDLELIGHT IN VOGUE.

Ecclesiastic Sticks Are Modernized Uy Eashion to Sult the Home. The Jack who can jump over th* new art candlestick must be a lightfooted and sinewy person, for brass, bronze, and silver candlesticks, measuring from three to seven feet in height, are no longer counted among the rare and expensive furnishings for the handsome drawing and dining rooms. The great ecclesiastical candelabrum gave the ambitious house decorator his first inspiration for this, and so potent is the law of fashion now governing the house beautiful that candle light is esteemed far above the clearer and more powerful gas, oil, or electric light illumination. This is, of course, where the candle and candlestick makers score heavily and profitably, and to meet the demand for wax, paraffin, and tallow tapers, and for brass, crystal, bronze, silver, and copper sticks, their skill and ingenuity is taxed with the richest results. In the shops where antiques are sold there is hardly a pretense any longer maintained of keeping in stock genuine metal sticks that have been rest from cathedrals, synagogues, or medieval houses. That supply is exhausted, but the modern imitator of classic forms lives nobly up to his task of supplying the active need for these warea A beautiful pair of hand-beat-en brass or copper sticks from the studio of a reputable modern metalworker fetch as high a price as a genuine antique, and just now there is no small amount of enthusiasm demonstrated over single, massive square sticks, for the adornment of newel posts, wrought by one American artist. A fine specimen he has recently completed for. a seaside villa shows the rising sun and an ancient caravel in high relief on one of its sides; and this handsome column, fitted to a black oak newel post, holds a tallow taper as big as a man’s wrist and three feet tall. For the same house he wrought ifi silver a pair of mantel shelf sticks in the Aubrey Beardsley style. Two tall and slender girls, in close, clinging draperies of silver, let fall about their narrow ivory faces straight, mermaid locks, also of silver. The streaming tresses float outward, turn up at the ends, and In those ends sockets for candles are set. —Chicago Journal.