Vintage Brass Candlestick Lamp with Laurel Tole Shade, c. 1965–1985

The Piece

A polished brass candlestick carrying a brown tole shade painted with white laurel swags, each one tied off with a bow.

The decoration is the reason to look twice. Around the shade run three swags of laurel — fine paired leaves on a curving stem — each hung from a small tied bow, with a single dot punctuating the gaps between them. Two white lines circle the lower edge. It is drawn with a loaded brush, and the white sits slightly proud of the brown with a stippled edge where the paint has caught.

Above the shade sits a pierced brass gallery: a band of interlaced strapwork cut right through, so that with the lamp lit the top of the shade throws a ring of small bright shapes onto the ceiling.

The base is a turned brass candlestick — a tapering stem with a collar at its waist, rising from a domed and stepped foot, and finishing in a wide drip-pan seat at the top.

Out of that seat rises a cream candle sleeve, and through it runs the socket, operated by a cast brass turn-key shaped like an old escutcheon key with a scrolled bow.

The cord is brown and exits at the base.

History & Provenance

Take the shade first, because with a brown shade of this shape there are three possibilities and only one of them is worth paying for.

It is not glass and it is not plastic. It is painted sheet metal — tole — and the rim proves it. Look along the lower edge and the metal is rolled over on itself into a wired hem, and at one point there is a lapped seam where the cone was closed. The body is completely opaque: with the bulb lit, light escapes at the top and the bottom and nowhere through the shade at all. Inside, the reflective coat has been laid on by brush, and the strokes are still visible across it.

Tole is the old French term for painted tinware, and painted metal shades belong to a specific tradition: the bouillotte and candle lamps of the eighteenth century used them because metal survives a naked flame and a paper or silk shade does not. The form carried over into electricity because the light it throws is better — an opaque shade sends everything down onto the table instead of glowing at you.

The vocabulary here is Federal and the accent is American. Laurel swags caught up with ribbon bows, a pierced strapwork gallery, a turned brass candlestick on a stepped foot: this is the colonial-revival decorating idiom that ran through American brass and lighting for decades, driven by the Colonial Williamsburg reproduction programme and the makers who supplied that trade.

The one mark on the lamp dates it. The underside of the shade carries its original Underwriters Laboratories label, intact and fully legible: UNDERWRITERS LABORATORIES INC, LISTED, PORTABLE LAMP, ISSUE J-7228, E-20773. It is the yellow oval adhesive format with a registered-trademark symbol, which is the later of UL’s two long-running lamp-label styles — the printed paper band wrapped around the socket came first. On that evidence, with the colonial-revival design and the brass-and-tole construction, it is offered as c. 1965–1985.

Nothing on the visible surfaces names a maker. That is ordinary in this trade, where brass founders, shade painters and lamp assemblers were three different businesses and the finished lamp went out under a retailer’s name or none at all. It is offered unattributed.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is the most useful kind of lamp there is: one that lights a surface instead of a room.

Because the shade is opaque metal rather than paper or silk, everything goes downward. On a desk, a hall table, a bedside or a sideboard you get a bright pool where you need it and no glare at eye level. That is why the form exists, and it is why a metal shade beats a fabric one anywhere you actually do something.

The pierced gallery is the other half of it. All the light that would otherwise be wasted out of the top escapes through the cut strapwork instead, so a dark ceiling above the lamp fills with a ring of small bright marks. Turn it on in a dim room and it draws the eye immediately.

The colours are as easy as colours get. Warm brown, polished brass, and one clean white line of decoration. It sits with mahogany, walnut, leather, old books, brass and tortoiseshell without a moment’s argument, and against a dark painted wall it reads beautifully.

The scale is right for the places lamps are actually needed. At around eighteen inches it will not dominate a hall console or crowd a nightstand, and it is tall enough to be useful over a desk.

And the hand-painting is genuinely good. Laurel swags drawn with a loaded brush, each leaf a separate touch, each bow tied a little differently from the last. That is a person at a bench, and at close range it separates this from the moulded and printed shades sold beside it.

A note on use. Have the wiring checked before regular service. The lamp lights, but the cord is of its own age, and a lamp shop will fit a new one for very little.

Fit a bulb of 60 watts or less, or an LED. A metal shade traps heat above the bulb far more than a fabric one, and heat is what lifts and blisters painted decoration from the inside.

Clean the tole with a barely damp cloth and dry it at once, and never use an abrasive or a solvent on the painted surface. The white decoration is paint on a painted ground and it will come away.

Leave the brass alone unless you want it brighter. It is bright and even as it stands; polish removes lacquer as well as tarnish, and once the lacquer is gone the brass will need polishing again every few months for the rest of its life.