Antique Amber Cherub Glass Oil Lamp Font, Electrified, c. 1890–1915

The Piece

A pressed amber glass lamp font, moulded with winged cherub heads, standing on a gilt cast base under a hand-painted milk glass shade.

The font is the piece and it is a serious piece of glass. A heavy hollow globe in deep amber, pressed in a two-part mould and moulded in high relief with a winged cherub head on each face — a round child’s face, calm and full-cheeked, with feathered wings sweeping up and outward from behind the head and deep acanthus scrolls curling away to form the shoulders.

The relief is deep enough to read as sculpture rather than pattern. Light passing through the amber picks out every undercut, and the glass itself is full of the fine internal striae and swirl of hand-gathered metal.

The globe is open at the top, closed by a threaded brass collar, and set at the bottom into a brass flange on the stem.

Beneath that, a heavy cast base finished in gold: a fluted trumpet column spreading into four rococo scroll feet with cartouche panels between them. The gilding is worn back to a grey-white metal across the high points, and fine cracking runs through the surface of the metal on one panel.

Above the font sits a nickel-plated burner — a rounded cap, a band of punched draught holes, and a crown of pierced flame-shaped points standing up where the chimney would seat. The bulb comes up through the middle of it.

The shade is white milk glass with a crimped and ruffled top rim, carried on a beaded brass ring and hand-painted around its lower half with full golden-orange blooms, green foliage and blush shadow-leaves, the stamens dotted on in raised opaque white.

History & Provenance

This is an oil lamp that was wired for electricity, not an electric lamp built to look like one. The font settles it.

The amber globe is hollow. It is open at the top and closed by a threaded brass collar, and it is seated into a brass flange at the bottom — font, collar, burner, in that order. That is the construction of a kerosene lamp and of nothing else. A decorative electric lamp in this shape has a solid or open glass shell with a rod through it; this one was built to hold fuel.

The burner above it is a kerosene burner. The punched band feeds air to a flame and the pierced crown seats a glass chimney — both are working features of a wick burner, kept when the lamp was converted, with the socket fitted up through the middle.

The glass is period pressed work. It carries the fine internal striae and swirl of a hand-gathered, hand-pressed metal, the relief is deep and sharply undercut, and the cherub-head-and-acanthus motif belongs to the Victorian parlour-lamp vocabulary rather than to any later revival of it.

The base agrees. It is a heavy white-metal casting under a gilt finish, worn back to the grey metal on every raised edge, with fine cracking running through the surface of the metal itself on one panel rather than through the paint film over it.

On that evidence — the hollow collared font, the kerosene burner, the character of the glass and the state of the casting — the lamp is offered as c. 1890–1915, later electrified.

The form is the American parlour lamp of the late nineteenth century, the type that came to be called Gone With The Wind: a globe font over a decorative base, with a matching globe shade above, standing in front rooms from the 1880s until electricity displaced it.

Two honest qualifications, because they matter to what you are buying.

The shade is hand-painted and it is a good one — the brushstrokes run visibly through each petal in different directions, no two blooms are laid out alike, and the white stamens stand proud of the glass as separate drops, none of which a printed or decal shade does. But its loose loaded-brush manner is not certainly of the font’s own date, and shades are the first thing to break and be replaced on a lamp of this age. It may be a later replacement, and it is described as a hand-painted milk glass shade rather than as original to the lamp.

The same caution applies to the base. It is a period-character casting and it suits the font, but font and base were separable components, and no claim is made that these two left the factory together.

Nothing on the lamp carries a maker’s name, mould number or label. The cherub font pattern is distinctive enough to be a catalogued design of its day, but it is not identified here on a guess, and the lamp is offered unattributed.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Deep amber glass with a light inside it is the warmest thing you can put in a room, and this is a pound and a half of it with faces moulded into the surface.

Lit, the font does not simply glow. The relief is deep enough that every undercut throws its own internal shadow, so the cherub heads come forward out of the scrollwork and the wings catch a brighter edge. Unlit in daylight it still reads as sculpture, which is more than most coloured glass manages.

The glass is the real argument. Hand-gathered pressed metal has swirl and striae running through it that modern glass does not, and against a bulb those move as you move. It is the difference between a colour and a material.

The shade is hand-painted and visibly so from three feet away — strokes running through each petal, no two blooms alike, stamens standing up off the glass as separate white drops.

Together the palette is honey, cream, gold and green, and there is almost nothing in an older room it will not sit with: oak, walnut, brass, leather, dark paint, old rugs, other amber glass.

At twenty inches it belongs where a lamp is meant to be looked at as well as used — a sideboard, a hall table, a piano, a bedroom chest, a shop counter. A pair at either end of a console would carry a wall on their own.

And it is a survivor. This was built to burn kerosene in a front room before most American houses had wiring, and somebody thought enough of it to convert it rather than retire it. It has been in use, in one form or another, for more than a century.

A note on use, and this one is not optional. Have it rewired before regular service. The cord and plug are old and unpolarized, and an electrician or lamp shop will fit a modern set for very little. That is money worth spending on a lamp of this age.

Fit 60 watts or less, or an LED. Painted glass and heat do not agree over time, and an LED keeps the shade cool while giving the same warm colour.

Clean the shade with a barely damp soft cloth and nothing abrasive. The decoration is painted on the outer surface and a scouring pad or a solvent will take it straight off.

Lift the lamp by the base, never by the shade, the burner or the font. The shade sits loose in its ring, and the font is glass on a collar.

And leave the gilt base alone. It is a finish over a casting, not solid metal; polish strips it back and it does not come back.