These magnificent candelabra are closely related to a model commissioned by Tsar Alexander II from the celebrated Manufacture de Baccarat for the private apartments of his wife, Tsarina Maria Alexandrovna. The model was subsequently known as 'candélabre de la Tsarine.’ The Tsar admired the candelabrum on Baccarat’s stand at the Paris Exposition universelle of 1867, and his subsequent commission – for a candelabrum, a fountain and a guéridon – was the first in a series of substantial orders by the Romanov family from the celebrated manufactory. Over the course of the following decades, Baccarat would go on to furnish many of the grandest palaces of the Russian Imperial Family, employing nearly 1000 workers on commissions for the Romanovs at the turn of the century. A similar candelabrum was shown at the recent exhibition on Baccarat at the Grand Palais in Paris and is illustrated in Baccarat, La Légende du Cristal, 15 October 2014 – 4 January 2015, Paris, 2014, p. 69. Another similar pair sold Sotheby’s, New York, 20 April 2007, lot 249 ($204,000).