Vintage Oak and Smoked Glass Lantern Table Lamp, c. 1960–1980

The Piece

A tall lantern table lamp built as an open oak box on a stepped plinth, with an illuminated candle cluster standing inside the lantern and a second light above it under a tall cylinder shade.

The lantern is framed by four corner posts of oak, chamfered and finished in a warm antiqued gold, each capped with a small brass ball. Tinted smoke coloured panels fill the sides, dark enough to read as glass rather than as an opening, so the light inside glows through instead of glaring out.

Inside the box a round brass pan carries two candle tubes with their own sockets. Lit on its own, the lantern reads as a night light and the smoked panels do the rest. The main socket sits above, carried on a brass rod that rises through the top of the lantern to the harp.

The base is a squared oak plinth in three steps, moulded at each break, which gives the whole piece the architectural look these lamps were after.

The shade is a tall straight cylinder in a coarse natural linen weave, banded at the top edge in a deep tobacco brown and finished with a fine gold rope gimp. It is a shade with real presence and it suits the lantern beneath it.

History & Provenance

This is an American lamp of the period when Mediterranean and Spanish revival taste ran through the domestic lighting catalogues, and it carries all the markers of it: oak with an antiqued gold wash on the metal, smoke tinted panels, brass ball finials, and a heavy stepped base.

The construction is the more useful evidence. The lantern is a proper joined box rather than a frame screwed to a plate, the corner posts are cut and finished individually, and the interior candle cluster is a separate circuit rather than a decorative dummy. Two circuit lamps of this sort, where the base lights independently of the shade, were a catalogue feature promoted as a night light and they belong to the postwar decades rather than to any earlier tradition of lantern lighting.

No maker's label survives on the base or the socket shell as found. That absence sets an outer limit and not a starting point, and the range below is given at the width the physical evidence actually supports rather than narrowed for effect.

Lamps of this weight and finish were sold as a single statement piece for a hall table, a sideboard or a study, and they were expensive when new. The oak, the joinery and the quality of the shade are what separate them from the lighter pressed metal lanterns that copied the look.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Most table lamps are a base with a light on top. This one is a piece of furniture that happens to light. The lantern has a front, a depth and an interior, and when the candle cluster is on by itself it throws a low amber glow through the smoked panels that no shaded lamp can do.

That second circuit is the whole argument. Full light for reading, the lantern alone for an evening, and the two together when you want the room warm rather than bright.

It has the proportions for a hall table, a long sideboard or the end of a library run, and the oak and brass will sit comfortably with leather, walnut, rush and stone. Scale like this is hard to buy. A pair of small lamps will never do what one tall one does.