Pair of Neoclassical Steel and Brass Floor Lamps with Hunting Horns, Style of Maison Charles, circa 1940

With their sinuously modelled hunting horns incorporated into a composition of brushed steel and polished brass, this exceptional pair of neoclassical floor lamps represents French decorative craft at its most inventive and assured. The hunting horn — a motif rich in aristocratic association, evoking the great forests and the traditions of the chase that defined the leisure culture of the French nobility — is deployed here with a playfulness and rigour that transforms it into an object of considerable decorative power. Pairs such as this, commanding in their symmetry and generous in their proportions, were made for the great salons.

Maison Charles, founded in Paris in 1908, established itself as one of the leading bronze and metalwork studios of twentieth-century France, celebrated for the exacting quality of its casting and the breadth of its artistic imagination. Producing lighting, furniture mounts and decorative objects for a clientele ranging from private collectors to luxury hotels and public institutions, the house became synonymous with a distinctively French form of decorative opulence — always rigorous, always informed by a thorough knowledge of the classical tradition.

Standing 174 cm tall, this pair commands any space with the authority of great decorative objects aware of their own history. The contrast of the brushed steel with the warmer glow of the brass creates a material tension that gives the lamps a vibrancy and depth unusual in pieces of this period. Positioned in a double salon, a grand reception room, or flanking a fireplace or console, they will bring a note of aristocratic distinction that few objects can match.