Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, London, 2 June 2010.
Private collection, UK

D Bilbey, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000: A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V & A Publications, 2002), nos. 550, 551, pp. 366-7.
Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture (London: Yale University Press, 1983), p2.

Alfred Stevens (1817-1875) was an artist and sculptor whose work, according to the revisionist account by Susan Beattie, played a central role in the development of the New Sculpture Movement. Stevens first trained as a painter in Italy, following which he was appointed in 1845 as an instructor in painting and ornament in London at the Government School of Design at Somerset House but resigned only two years later. For Stevens, industrial design and fine art worked in parallel and is reflected in the diversity of his design range and mediums. Stevens’s work includes table-centres, chimney pieces, street lamps and medals, as well as designing the decorative railings outside the British Museum. Stevens's creative output also included portraiture, ceramics, silverware and book illustration. Between the years 1850 to 1857 he was chief designer to Hoole & Co., Sheffield.

Stevens received two major commissions, which occupied much of his later life – to build a monument to the Duke of Wellington for St Paul’s Cathedral, and to complete the dining-room decorations for Dorchester House in London. The Wellington monument was partly finished posthumously by his student, biographer, and subsequently sculptor, Hugh Stannus (1840-1908), in 1878, only to be fully realised in 1912 by John Tweed (1869-1933). Stevens’s time in Italy fostered a life-long appreciation of the Italian Renaissance, with the influence of Michelangelo ever present in his own creations. His inspiration is especially evident in his models of the Wellington monument, which are held in collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as in the Tate, London, in which can be seen a combination of Michelangelo and medievalism. The ensemble commission in Dorchester House, which consisted of linking painting, sculpture, furniture and furnishings also enabled Stevens to explore in full his admiration of the Renaissance master, although unfortunately the house was demolished in 1929.

Maquettes for the figures of these andirons are preserved in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum.