Bracket

During the second half of the nineteenth century, many affluent and upper-middle-class Americans with progressive tastes sought to signal their wealth and sophistication with a well-appointed home featuring "artistic" interiors. Sculptures, vases, and decorative objects were essential to fashionable, refined interiors, and appropriate display of such art required pedestals and brackets conceived to coordinate with both the objects on them and the household furnishings. These brackets would have been mounted to the wall to support treasured art works installed as part of an interior scheme that likely would have included other ebonized and gilded furniture. The brackets epitomize the Neo-Grec taste, which featured bold designs inspired by ancient Greece and Rome as popularized by France’s Napoleon III.