James 'Athenian' Stuart, Diederich Nicolaus Anderson. Perfume Burner.

A tripod in gilt bronze

The burner is nearly 54 cm high, about 27 cm wide and at most 28.8 cm deep. It is cast, chased and gilded bronze, the material English calls ormolu, set on a marble plinth. It comes in two parts: burner and lid. It was made in London around 1760 and is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, in its galleries of British design.

The form is based on the classical tripods of ancient Greece, objects that stood in temples and similar monuments. According to the V&A label, the Greek and Roman tripod was first devised for sacrificial altars and was then taken up in many ways by neoclassical designers.

At the edge of the bowl are three slots. They were meant to hold three branches with candle sconces. A very similar burner at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire still has its branches fitted. The V&A example does not.

The V&A calls it an early example. The label states that Stuart designed it for Spencer House in London.

The architect and the metalworker

The designer was James Stuart, born in London in 1713 and died there in 1788. He was called Athenian Stuart because, with Nicholas Revett, he measured and drew the ancient buildings of Athens. The first volume of their Antiquities of Athens appeared in 1762.

Those drawings brought Greek architecture to England directly, not through Roman copies. Stuart used them for aristocratic houses and gardens: garden temples, triumphal arches, and furnishings such as tables, stands, vases and tripods. This perfume burner belongs to that group.

The maker, according to the V&A, was probably Diederich Nicolaus Anderson, a London ormolu maker who died in 1767. Stuart drew, Anderson cast. The architect gave the form; the craftsman turned it into metal.

Sir John Soane's Museum in London holds Stuart's drawings for similar burners. One shows candle branches, the other does not. According to the V&A, this suggests the branches were optional. The same object could scent a room, or scent and light it at once.

A smell drawn into the plan

What makes this burner remarkable is not only its beauty. It is who drew it. An architect, someone calculating the proportions of an entire room, also took time to design the object that would scent that room.

That means smell was considered alongside ceiling, walls and furniture. It was not added afterwards. The burner speaks the same language as the rest of the room: Greek, balanced, with a clear ancestry. The smell it released was, in that sense, part of the design.

No record says what the burner once held. This essay does not guess. What remains is the form, and the form is enough to show how seriously smell was taken. No one puts a gilt bronze temple tripod in a drawing room if smell is an afterthought.

More than forty years later, Wedgwood brought the same tripod form into fired clay with the Dolphin Tripod pastille burner. From Stuart's gilt bronze to Wedgwood's black clay, the form moved down from great houses to more ordinary homes. Stuart's burner is worth remembering because it stands at the start of that path: the moment an architect decided that a room's smell was his business too.