Vintage Cast Palm Tree Candlesticks, Pair, Verdigris, c. 1950–1960

The Piece

A pair of cast palm-tree candlesticks, each a trunk rising from a domed base to a crown of spreading fronds that opens into the drip pan.

The base is a shallow dome on a stepped rim, cast around its slope with a ring of radiating fronds so the tree appears to stand in its own undergrowth. The rim finishes in a clean turned edge.

The trunk tapers as a real palm does, thick at the ground and narrowing as it rises, and it is cast the whole way up with the diamond lattice a palm leaves behind as its old frond bases drop away. The pattern is irregular, not a repeating machined grid, so the texture reads as bark rather than as ornament.

The crown is the best of it. Ten fronds spread from a collar at the top of the trunk, each one modelled with a raised midrib and engraved herringbone veining running out to the tip, each dipping and lifting at a slightly different angle. They form a wide, shallow pan, and the candle socket stands at the centre of it.

Every frond is pierced with a small round hole near its tip — ten of them on each crown, consistent in size and placement, cast or drilled with intent rather than opened by damage. They are the right size and the right position to carry hanging glass drops, which is how palm-form lights of this kind were often dressed, though nothing hangs from them now.

The sticks are built as separate castings drawn together on a central rod: base, trunk, and frond crown, with a visible collar at each junction and a machined bushing through the underside of the base.

The surface is a deep copper-brown with green verdigris standing in the recesses of the bark and around the base ornament, rubbed back on the high points of the fronds and the rim to a lighter metal. Both undersides are felted, the felt worn through to the adhesive across the bearing areas.

History & Provenance

The palm has been a decorator’s motif for two hundred years, and it has meant something slightly different each time it came back.

Regency England took it from Egypt and India, by way of the campaigns and the trade routes, and put palm trunks and frond capitals on furniture, firedogs, bed posts and light fittings as a mark of the exotic reach of empire. The colonial houses of the tropics used it plainly, because that was what grew outside. And the twentieth century took it back up repeatedly — in the 1930s, and hard again through the later decades, when British Colonial and Hollywood Regency decorating made palm-form lamps, candlesticks and tables a staple of the good furniture trade.

This pair belongs to that decorative line rather than to the architectural one. They are made the way quality cast lighting hardware has been made for a very long time: separate castings stacked on a threaded rod and drawn up tight, which lets a maker combine a base, a stem and a crown from different moulds and finish the assembly as one object. Felt on the underside is the same instinct — these were made to stand on polished furniture.

The frond holes are worth noting honestly. Ten to a crown, even in size and position, they are a deliberate feature of the casting rather than later damage, and they would carry hanging drops. Whether they ever did is not established here and no drops are present.

On date, the construction and finish carry it and neither carries it far. Rod-assembled castings, a copper-toned patinated finish with verdigris grown into the recesses, and felted bases are the practice of the decorative metal trade across a long span. The wear is real: the felt is worn through where the sticks have stood, the frond tips and the base rim are rubbed back to lighter metal, and the verdigris has grown in the protected recesses rather than been painted on. On that evidence the pair is offered as c. 1950–1990.

Neither stick carries a maker’s mark or a country of origin. One base carries inked inventory marks from a previous owner or dealer.

One thing is left open rather than guessed. The alloy has not been verified. The colouring is a copper-toned patinated finish, and where the high points are rubbed a lighter metal shows beneath it, which is consistent with more than one body metal. A magnet, a weight and a clean look at bare metal would settle it, and a solid copper alloy would place this pair materially higher than it is offered at here.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A palm tree is a strange and very good thing to put a candle in.

Most candlesticks are an abstract shape — a baluster, a column, a stem. This one is a picture of something, and it stays legible from across a room: trunk, bark, crown, the fronds lifting at different angles the way real ones do. It carries a table on its own without needing anything arranged around it.

Lit, the crown does the work. The fronds catch the flame from below and throw a spoked shadow up a wall, and because the ten of them sit at slightly different heights the shadow is uneven and alive rather than a flat star.

The colour is the easy part. Copper-brown with green standing in the recesses is a palette that agrees with almost everything — dark wood, painted furniture, rattan, brass, limewash — and reads as warm in a way that polished metal does not.

A pair matters more with candlesticks than with almost anything else. Two flanking a mirror, a mantel, a pair of books or the ends of a table give you symmetry, and a single candlestick spends its life looking for its partner.

They suit a British Colonial room, a conservatory, a green-painted library, a coastal house, or a modern interior where two dark sculptural objects are doing all the decorating. Out of candle season they read as bronzes and stay on the shelf.

And the frond holes are an invitation. Ten fixing points on each crown will carry glass drops, small crystals, shell, or nothing at all — a detail whose original dressing is long gone and which a buyer can take up or leave alone.

On use. They take a standard taper. Use a drip protector or accept that wax will find the frond pan, and let wax cool hard before lifting it away rather than scraping it warm — the finish is a surface colouring and a blade will take it off.

On care. Dust with a soft dry brush into the bark lattice, which holds it. Do not polish, do not use metal cleaner and do not wash them: the verdigris in the recesses and the rubbed high points are the whole character, and a cleaner would strip in minutes what took decades to arrive. If a felt bothers you, replace it rather than removing it — the bare casting will mark furniture.