Early 20th C. Colonial Art Glass Company Table Lamp w/ Filigree

North America, United States, Chicago, Colonial Art Glass Company. A domed shade of caramel slag glass caged in openwork metal, its panels arranged in overlapping scale-like lozenges alternating with cartouches of scrolling arabesque filigree. The cast overlay, likely spelter, retains a soft verdigris-toned patina and terminates in a pierced crown and acorn finial. Beneath rises a slender columnar standard on a stepped square plinth, the whole apparently brass with an oxidized surface, the underside of the base struck with a "Colonial" mark for the Colonial Art Glass Company of Chicago. Three sockets sit within the dome, each governed by its own switch, so the lamp can be lit in stages, from a single glowing quadrant to full illumination. The metalwork vocabulary, restless scrollwork and imbricated scales, draws on Art Nouveau and Moorish revival taste as filtered through mass production. Slag glass, an opalescent glass streaked by the addition of metallic oxides or cooled furnace slag, entered American lampmaking in force after 1900 as an affordable alternative to leaded art glass. Where Tiffany and Handel built shades from hundreds of individually cut and foiled pieces, Chicago and New England firms set larger sheets of slag glass behind cast metal overlays, achieving a comparable warmth of light at a fraction of the labor. Chicago was a principal center of that trade in the years around 1910, and the Colonial Art Glass Company worked squarely within it, marking its bases simply "Colonial." The three-socket cluster with independent switches was a period selling point: householders newly wired for electricity prized the ability to modulate brightness before dimmers were common. Item # 161015

Estimate:£300.57

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