Mid-Century Chartreuse Ceramic Ginger Jar Table Lamp, c. 1955–1975

The Piece

A small ceramic table lamp in a hard, bright chartreuse green — the kind of colour that decides a room the moment it is switched on.

The body is a ginger-jar baluster: a swelling shoulder narrowing to a waisted neck, then falling away to a wide stepped foot with two turned rings above the base. Above the shoulder sits a moulded collar, and above that a second smaller ring, both in the same glaze, so the ceramic carries right up to the socket rather than stopping at a metal fitting.

The glaze is thick and high-gloss, pooling slightly darker in the hollows of the turnings and pulling thinner and more yellow over the high points of the foot. Fine dark specks are scattered through it where iron in the body has come through the glaze in firing.

The hardware is brass-finished: a socket shell with a black phenolic turn-knob at the side, seated on a short brass neck and a pair of stepped collars, with a brass shade ring above.

The cord is brown twisted lampcord, exiting through a hole set into the back of the foot, and finishing in a moulded brown two-blade plug stamped A.I.W.C° on one blade.

Wrapped around the socket shell is the original paper label: E-23…02, Underwriters’ Laboratories, Inc., LISTED, PORTABLE LAMP, C-8506.

The shade is a plain coolie shade in cream paper with a bound edge, on a wire spider.

History & Provenance

Two questions matter on a ceramic lamp, and this one answers both from the object.

The first is whether it was made as a lamp or made as a vase and drilled later. A converted vase has a hole cut through fired, glazed ceramic, and the cut edge is raw and sharp-grained. This one is not that. Look into the hole at the foot: the green glaze runs right over the rim and turns down into the opening, with a smooth rounded lip. Glaze over the edge means the hole was there before the glaze went on and before the piece was fired. It left the pottery as a lamp body.

The underside says the same. The foot ring is unglazed bisque, as a foot ring should be, and the recessed centre inside it is finished in a plain cream glaze — a different glaze from the green outside, applied deliberately to the part nobody sees. That is factory work, not a conversion.

The second question is the date, and here the wiring carries it rather than the ceramic.

The plug is not polarized. Both blades are the same width, each pierced with a hole, moulded into a brown thermoplastic body. American lamps moved to polarized plugs — one blade wider than the other — through the later twentieth century, and a lamp still wearing an unpolarized moulded plug was wired before that change. The moulded plug itself sets the other end of the range: it replaced the screw-together plug of earlier decades.

The paper label on the socket supports it. Underwriters’ Laboratories in blackletter, LISTED, and PORTABLE LAMP, which is UL’s own category name for a table or floor lamp. This is the factory label, not a later addition, and it is still legible after sixty-odd years on a hot socket shell.

Nothing on the piece names a maker. The base carries no stamp, no impressed mark and no paper label, only the residue of a felt pad that has come away. That is ordinary for the American lamp trade, where potteries supplied bodies to lamp assemblers who wired them and shipped them out under the retailer’s name or none at all. On the evidence of the wiring and the label it is offered as c. 1955–1975, unattributed.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Buy this one for the colour. Everything else about it is quietly competent; the glaze is the reason it exists.

Chartreuse is a difficult green to find and an easy one to use. It is warm enough to sit with wood and brass, sharp enough to cut a room of neutrals, and it does something no printed colour does — under a glossy glaze it shifts from yellow-green in daylight to deep olive in lamplight, so the object is not the same at four o’clock as at nine.

The form does the work of making that colour respectable. A ginger jar on a stepped foot is a traditional silhouette, so the lamp reads as furniture rather than as a statement, and the strong glaze lands as confidence rather than novelty. That combination is exactly why these were made in such numbers and exactly why the good ones have held their value.

At around nineteen inches it is a small lamp, which is the useful size. It fits where a full-height lamp will not: a nightstand, a bookshelf, a hall console, a desk corner, the end of a kitchen counter, a bathroom shelf. Two of them on a pair of tables would do more for a room than one large lamp.

The glaze is also unusually good at its job. High-gloss ceramic throws light back into the room from the base as well as the shade, so a low-wattage bulb reads brighter than it is — which matters in a corner where you want warmth rather than illumination.

And it is genuinely of its moment without being a costume. The green, the ginger-jar body, the brass socket with its little black knob: an American lamp from the middle of the last century, still wearing its factory label, still turning.

A note on use, and it is the important one. Have it rewired before you use it regularly. The cord and plug are original, which is good for provenance and not good for a modern outlet; any lamp shop or electrician will fit a new cord and socket in a few minutes for very little money. Keep the old plug in a drawer if you want the evidence.

Fit a bulb of 60 watts or less, or an LED equivalent. The ceramic will not mind but the paper shade will, and heat is what yellows and cracks a paper shade.

Clean the ceramic with a damp cloth and nothing abrasive. The gloss is the whole point and a scouring pad will dull it permanently.

Put a felt pad under the foot before it goes on a polished surface. The original pad is gone and the unglazed bisque foot ring will mark timber.