Hand-Painted Ceramic Candlestick with Pink and Blue Flower Spray, Painter's Palette Marks to the Base, Lasting Products Inc., American, c. 1955–1975

The Piece

A short turned candlestick in a soft ivory glaze, built on the classic profile: a wide domed foot, a knopped baluster stem, and a cupped socket with a flared drip pan at the top.

Around the foot runs a hand-painted flower spray — a pink five-petalled blossom and a rounded cornflower blue one, each with a yellow centre ringed in dark blue dots, set among soft green leaves. Look closely and the petals are individual brush strokes, laid down wet and slightly overlapping, with the pink thinning at the edge of each stroke where the brush lifted.

The foot is finished with a raised bead and a recessed channel, both catching the light.

Underneath, the base is unglazed white bisque, and this is where it gets interesting — there is a green dot, two yellow dabs and a pink smear scattered across it, and an oval foil label in red and gold that reads HAND PAINTED — LASTING PRODUCTS INC. — MADE IN USA.

History & Provenance

Those marks on the base are not damage. They are the decorator's palette.

A painter working a production line loads a brush, and before touching the piece, swipes or dabs it somewhere out of sight to check the colour and how much is on the bristles. The unglazed foot is the natural place: it is porous, it will not wipe clean, and nobody sees it. Every colour on the front of this candlestick is on the bottom of it — green, yellow, pink — which is as direct a piece of evidence as decorated ceramics offers. It is a physical record of the hand that painted it, and it is the reason the label's claim can be taken at face value.

The rest of the evidence agrees. The two flowers on the front are not identical to one another and the spray is not centred with machine precision. The dark blue dots ringing each yellow centre vary in size and spacing. A decal or a transfer would be uniform, would sit slightly proud of the glaze, and would show a fine screen pattern under magnification; none of that is present.

The label is the dating evidence. Foil labels of this type — a metallic oval, red ground, gold lettering, small stars — were the giftware trade's standard branding in the middle of the twentieth century, replacing gummed paper and preceding the printed adhesive labels that followed. That it has survived intact is itself informative: the piece was kept and displayed rather than washed, and probably spent most of its life in a cabinet.

“MADE IN USA” is a sales argument, not a formality. American giftware potteries printed it largest in exactly the decades when imported hand-painted ware was taking their market, and on a small decorative object it is aimed straight at the shopper.

Dated on the label type, the American marking and the state of both: c. 1955–1975. Lasting Products Inc. is named on the label; nothing further about the company is asserted here, and the candlestick is offered as marked rather than attributed beyond it.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A single low candlestick is one of the most useful small objects there is, precisely because it is short.

A tall one blocks a face across a table. This one lights a dinner without getting in the way of it, and it works just as well on a bathroom shelf, a bedside table, a windowsill, a mantel, a desk or a bookshelf. It takes a standard taper and stands level, so it does not need a plate under it.

The palette is the reason it travels. Ivory, pink, cornflower blue, soft green and yellow are the colours of a cottage kitchen and of a chintz bedroom both, and they sit happily on painted wood, brown furniture, marble, a stack of books, or a shelf of white china.

It is also a good gift — small, cheerful, unbreakably easy to like — and it comes with a story worth passing on, which is that you can turn it over and see the actual paint the decorator tested before she painted the flowers.

A note on care, and the first point is the one that saves most candlesticks. Never dig hardened wax out with a knife. Put the candlestick in the freezer for half an hour and the wax shrinks and lifts out whole; anything sharper takes the glaze with it.

Wash it by hand in warm water with a little mild soap. No dishwasher — heat and detergent will lift the foil label off the base within one cycle, and the label is part of what this piece is. Keep the unglazed foot out of standing water, since bare bisque absorbs and stains.

Use no abrasive pad, no scouring cream and no bleach on the painted area. Burn tapers that fit the socket snugly rather than wedging an oversized one in, never let a candle burn down into the socket, and keep it away from a draught so the flame does not lick the rim.