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

The Piece

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 standing on flat tapered straps beneath a scrolled arch. The front rail repeats the scroll in a lower register and finishes in tight volutes. Between them the floor of the well 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.

It stands on four turned metal feet, each a stepped drum with a separate washer glide beneath it.

The finish is a two tone antiqued treatment, warm gold over the frame with a cream ground reading through on the scrolls and the upper rail, worn back on the high points to bare metal. 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.

History & Provenance

The piece is unmarked, so everything it can be made to say comes out of how it was built.

Every junction on this frame is brazed rather than welded. The fillets are smooth and flowed, drawn into the joint by capillary action, with no spatter, no ropey bead and no sign of electric welding anywhere. 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 and more skilled operation than the spot and wire welding that replaced it in volume production.

The verticals 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 bar of the sling shows the fine longitudinal grain of drawn stock beneath the finish.

The feet are the most informative part of the object. The upright passes through the top of each turned 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 piece.

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. With no mark present, the attribution rests on the idiom and the construction rather than on a signature, and it is offered on that basis.

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 sets a floor in the years after the second war. The ceiling is set by the construction, because 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.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Most magazine racks are bent wire with nothing to look at. This one was made, and the difference shows at arm's length: a frieze of individually cast palmettes, a carrying rail drawn in a long serpentine curve, and feet turned on a lathe rather than bent from the same rod as the frame.

The scale is the useful part. At roughly twenty inches wide and twenty six high it is tall enough to read as furniture beside a chair rather than as an accessory on the floor, and the divided well keeps two runs of papers upright instead of letting everything slump into one pile.

The finish is what lets it sit in a room that is not otherwise gilt. Because the gold is held back by a cream ground and worn through on the high points, it reads warm rather than bright, and it will sit against walnut, against painted furniture, and against plain upholstery without taking the room over.

For a dealer or a designer, the construction is the argument. Anyone can offer a gilt metal magazine rack. Being able to point at a brazed fillet, a cast finial applied by hand and a turned foot with its own washer, and to date the piece from those three things rather than from a look, is what separates an object with a history from a decorative item with a price.