Vintage Mediterranean Revival Column Table Lamps, Pair, c. 1965–1978

The Piece

A matched pair of tall column table lamps in the Mediterranean Revival taste, each built up as a stack of architectural elements on a square stepped plinth, the whole of it finished dark walnut brown with every raised ornament picked out in olive green. Each plinth sits on a separate square block painted the same olive, so the green reads at the top and the bottom and the brown carries the middle.

The column runs through four distinct stages. The base is a waisted square pedestal with a shaped apron and a rosette centred on each face. Above it a narrow stepped collar, then a tapering four-sided shaft with a pendant leaf spray hanging under a scrolled bracket arch on each side. Above that a panelled section with small square frames enclosing single rosettes, two to a face. The column finishes in a flaring acanthus capital with the brass socket rising from the middle of it.

The shades are tall tapered empires in a finely pleated oatmeal fabric with a dark fleck, considerably taller than they are wide, which is what keeps the proportions upright rather than squat.

History & Provenance

Look at the ornament rather than the style and the lamps tell you how they were made. The rosette on the front face of a plinth is the same rosette on its two side faces, to the millimetre. The paired square panels running up the shaft repeat identically face to face. The leaf sprays match one another exactly. Then set the two lamps side by side and the whole sequence repeats again from one lamp to the other. A carver working by hand does not produce four identical anythings, let alone eight across two pieces; variation is the tell of hand work, and there is none here. This ornament came out of a mould.

That matters more than it sounds, because moulded composition with simulated carving and a simulated wood finish is a specific production technology rather than a look. It is what allowed American lamp manufacturers to put heavily ornamented Spanish and Italianate columns into ordinary living rooms at a price, and it belongs to the Mediterranean Revival wave that ran through American furniture and lighting from the middle 1960s until the style collapsed late in the 1970s. The olive green over dark walnut is that wave's signature palette, the same one that produced avocado kitchens and harvest gold appliances in the same years.

So the dating comes from the manufacture rather than the taste: mould-made polychrome columns of this kind are a product of that production run and not of any period they imitate. They are offered as c. 1965 to 1978. Nothing about them claims to be Spanish antiques, and they should not be mistaken for any; what they are instead is well-made and genuinely imposing American decorative production from a moment that is now being collected in its own right.

The one thing worth saying about a pair is that it survived as a pair. Lamps are bought in twos and separated in ones, at every house clearance and every downsizing, and the attrition is brutal. Two of these together, still wearing matching shades, is the harder half of the find.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A pair does something a single lamp cannot. Put one at each end of a console, a sideboard or a long sofa table and they frame the wall between them, which is the oldest trick in decorating and still the most reliable. At forty inches these read as architecture rather than as table lamps, so the frame they make is a strong one.

The colour is the other reason. Olive green against dark walnut is exactly the palette that rooms have come back around to, and these wear it without apology, in relief rather than as a coat of paint. Put them where the green has something to answer, a leather chair, a brass tray, an old kilim, and they stop looking like survivors of the 1970s and start looking deliberate.