Vintage Frederick Cooper Art Nouveau Table Lamp, c. 1985–2005

The Piece

A Frederick Cooper table lamp on a cast standard of three sinuous stems, marked on the socket shell for the Chicago house that made it.

The stems rise from a turned wood disc, each one curling into a whiplash foot at the bottom and breaking into a leaf partway up, and they close together under a shallow chased dish that carries the brass riser to the socket. It reads as one piece of ironwork and is in fact several castings assembled on a central rod. Openwork the whole way, so the lamp draws a line in a room rather than filling a space in it.

The finish is applied rather than bare: a dark ground, gilt rubbed onto the raised work, green settled into the hollows. The wood base is stained to the same register so metal and timber read as one object.

The brass socket shell carries the maker's name in a band, FREDERICK COOPER above CHICAGO.

Two shades come with it. The one fitted is a cream silk bell, both rims bound in a woven ivory galloon carrying a running lozenge figure, held on a brass spider under a turned brass urn finial. It is the taller and plainer of the two and it gives the ironwork room to read.

The second is the lamp's own. A hexagonal silk bell in warm beige, the lower rim cut into a scallop that lifts at each seam, every panel piped in self fabric and sewn over a wire frame rather than laminated onto a backing. Frederick Cooper built its shades in its own Chicago shop alongside the bases, so a signed lamp that still has the shade it left with is the uncommon half of the pair.

History & Provenance

Frederick Cooper was a Chicago artist who set up a studio in 1923 to make sculpture and watercolours and found his way into lamp design from there. That origin is the character of the firm. Cooper treated a lamp as a small sculpture that happened to hold a bulb, and the house went on working that way from a four-storey plant at 2545 West Diversey Avenue, through the decades when Chicago was the lighting capital of the American trade.

The mark sets a hard ceiling. That Diversey Avenue plant closed in 2005 and the building was sold off and redeveloped; the name was revived under Wildwood in 2011 and now works out of Rocky Mount, North Carolina. A lamp that says CHICAGO on its socket was made before the plant shut.

The finish sets the floor. Frederick Cooper's metal work through the middle of the century and into the early eighties is overwhelmingly polished or lacquered brass, which is what fills the surviving trade inventory. A multi-layer antiqued finish of this kind, gilt rubbed over a dark ground with green in the recesses and the wood stained to match it, belongs to the Old World decorating that took over American furnishings from the later eighties.

On that evidence it is offered as c. 1985 to 2005. Four things would narrow it further: whether the plug is polarised, whether a UL or wattage label survives on the cord or socket, whether a model number or foil label survives under the base, and whether a maker's label survives sewn inside the shade.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

The standard is openwork top to bottom, so it sits on a chest, a hall table or a nightstand without closing the surface down the way a solid column does. At twenty-eight inches it is a lamp for a side table rather than a statement for a console.

The antiqued finish is the useful part. It does not fight an old room the way polished brass can, and it sits with oak, leather, iron and plaster instead of arguing with them. Set it against a deep wall and the gilt on the stems does the work.

It is signed and it is complete, and it arrives with a choice. Frederick Cooper is a name the trade knows, the Chicago plant is gone, and most of what survives has lost its shade to decades of replacements. This one kept its own and gained a second, so a room that wants the quieter cream and a room that wants the scalloped original are both served by the same lamp.