66. JOHAN ÅKERBLAD (mirror maker in Stockholm 1758-1799), a pair of mirror lampposts, Gustavian Stockholm works, signed IÅ under crown, woodcut decor, gilded with polished gold and percussion metal.

Oval shape, crown decorated with ribbon rosette and laurel festoons, frame with leaf and bead, brass light arms, mercury-foiled glass, 62 x 43 cm

PROVENANCE: Christopher O'Regan Collection

Christopher tells us:
Mirror maker Johan Åkerblad is one of the most brilliant fix-stars of the Gustavian era, not least when it comes to the interest and prices of his mirrors and mirror lamps at today's auctions. And his signature IÅ always arouses something certain in the eyes of the viewers and the prospective buyers, who also admire the other mirror makers in Gustaf III's Stockholm. But as so often, the experience of his mirrors is heightened by the extra dimension conveyed by the written source material, in which we also get to meet him as a human being. And as a father.
He had three sons, two of whom prepared him great troubles. According to a diary from the late 1780s, it is reported that Timotheus Åkerblad had “settled on the sipping of brandy”, and that he had “gone so far as to lose his fitness with Messrs. Lindell & Caré. The boy is seventeen years old and super in desperation so strong that he will never be people again.” And in March 1788 we find the notice that “in those days the honourable old man Åkerblad decided to send Timotheus, his son, abroad, on that he would not go here as a spectacle on the streets.” He left Stockholm and took up service with the navy as an archlimaster and died in Finland during the war against Russia in 1790. He turned twenty-two years old.
One of the other sons also came to contribute to his father's burdens, and he too is mentioned in the diary: “Emanuel Åkerblad I now hear the unpleasant reproaches that he destroyed at most twelve thousand dales of copper coins which are the inheritance of his mother, and what money he had forced from his father,” and that, as it says, “do not go around the streets as a spectacle, of his father been sent to Hamburg, and traveled on a ship away. In the deed of his father's death in 1799, it is recorded that his son Emanuel “departed nine years ago for Holland without being heard from him.” Such a sad fund against the beautiful mirror chandeliers, made by a man with, we might surmise, a broken paternal heart.