Gilt Iron Magazine Stand, Palmette Frieze, Brass Feet, c. 1950–1975

A gilt magazine stand built as a tall open frame, with a serpentine scrolled carrying rail arching across the top and a deep sling well slung between the end frames. The back panel carries a row of cast palmette finials beneath a scrolled arch, the front rail repeats the scroll in a lower register, and the whole piece stands on four turned metal feet. It is decoration and furniture at once, the kind of object made to sit beside a reading chair and be looked at as much as used.

The construction is worth reading closely, because it is what places the piece. Every junction is brazed rather than welded. The fillets are smooth, flowed and drawn into the joint by capillary action, with no spatter, no ropey bead, and no sign of electric welding anywhere on the frame. Those fillets have oxidised to a pale green crust, which is what copper alloy filler does over decades. Brazing of this kind was the ordinary method for light decorative metalwork through the middle of the twentieth century, and it is a slower, more skilled operation than the spot and wire welding that replaced it in volume production.

The vertical members of the back frieze are flat tapered strap rather than round rod, and each one carries a separately cast palmette brazed to its face. Applied cast ornament on a strap frame is a made detail, not an assembled one. The sling itself is a continuous run of bent round bar formed into deep U loops, with a divider rising through the centre to split the well into two compartments. The bar surface shows the fine longitudinal grain of drawn stock beneath the finish.

The feet are the most informative part of the piece. Each is a turned drum with a stepped collar and a separate washer glide beneath it, and the upright passes through the top of the drum and is fixed there with a ring of filler metal. Those feet have gone brown and gold where they are handled and pale green in the recesses, which is copper carbonate rather than iron oxide. There is no orange rust anywhere on this object.

The finish is a two tone antiqued treatment, warm gold over the frame with a cream ground that reads through on the scrolls and the upper rail, worn back on the high points to the metal. That antiqued gilt and cream palette on scrolled and brazed metalwork is the vocabulary of the Italian decorative metal trade that supplied the American market from the years after the war onward, the same trade that produced the gilt Florentine woodwork and tole of the period. The piece is unmarked, so the attribution rests on the idiom and the construction rather than on a signature.

Dating comes from how it is made rather than from how it looks. The magazine rack as a domestic form belongs to the twentieth century, arriving with the mass magazine market and the living room reading habit, and the antiqued gilt idiom seen here sets a floor in the years after the second war. The ceiling is set by the construction. Hand flowed braze fillets, flat tapered strap, separately cast applied finials and turned feet with washer glides are all operations that had largely left this tier of decorative production by the later nineteen seventies. The depth of oxidation at the joints and feet points to the earlier part of that span rather than the later. The piece is dated c. 1950 to 1975 on that evidence.

Condition is good and honest for its age. The antiqued finish is worn on the scroll tops and the carrying rail where hands have gone, with the cream ground and bare metal showing through in places. The brazed joints carry green oxidation, which is original to the metal and part of the surface. The frame is sound and sits square on all four feet. No breaks, no repairs and no losses to the cast ornament.

Approximate dimensions, 20 in. wide by 11 in. deep by 26 in. high.