603 - Pair of Bookends with Dog and Cat, Bronze on a Light Stone Base, Art Deco Style

Pair of Bookends with Dog and Cat, Bronze on a Light Stone Base, Art Deco Style Two bookends of light, veined stone, each worked from a rectangular base plate and a wedge-shaped rising support wall. On the base plates a small animal figure of dark patinated cast metal: one shows a dog walking forward with lowered head, the other a standing cat reaching with its left front paw for a mouse with a long tail. The fur of the figures is worked through. The undersides with black felt glides. Condition commensurate with age, the edges of the stone plates chipped, visible adhesive between base plate and support wall. H. 13 cm. Bookends with animal sculptures are among the common furnishings of middle-class libraries and studies of the interwar period; they combined a practical purpose with the small sculpture that stood in almost every living room at the time. The cream-white banded material of such bases is as a rule onyx marble, a calcareous sinter of calcite or aragonite deposited from spring water.