These columns were initially attributed to the workshop of the Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton, perhaps because subsequent to entering the Museum the stone for the columns was identified as 'fluorspar'. In the later part of the 18th century a rare form of purple and yellow banded fluorite known as blue john, found only in the Treak Cliff Cavern, near Castleton in Derbyshire, became a fashionable material for interior decoration and decorative household objects. Matthew Boulton had attempted (unsuccessfully) to profit from this popularity in 1769 and in the early 1770s by purchasing quantities of stone from the mine, much of which he carved in the form of vases and to which he added gilded metal mounts. However, aside from the fact that the stone of the columns was recently confirmed to be amethyst, the pair of columns formerly in the Jones collection do not correspond to the type of object produced by Bolton and the inspiration for the female figure balanced on a sphere and holding a laurel wreath appears to derive from French models. A gilded bronze candelabrum of 1810 from the workshop of the French bronze founder Pierre-Philippe Thomire (who at that date operated in partnership as Thomire, Duterme & Cie) is in the form of a similar, though much larger, female figure who holds aloft two wreaths, each set with four nozzles for candles, and who balances on a sphere mounted on a short column of polished red marble. It seems likely that the columns from the Jones collection are mid- to late-nineteenth-century pieces, made in England but loosely imitating royal French style of thirty or forty years previously.