Blue Blown Glass Table Lamp, French or Italian Work, circa 1970

Blue of exceptional depth and luminosity, the blown glass body of this lamp achieves at ninety-three centimetres tall a sculptural presence rarely found in decorative lighting of any period. The glass itself — transparent and richly coloured, its surface bearing the subtle irregularities of the glassblower’s breath — transforms when illuminated into a column of vibrating colour, the light diffused through the medium with an intensity that shifts with the hours of the day. At thirty-five centimetres wide, the proportions are assured and generous; the lamp functions equally as a sculptural object when unlit, the deep blue glass asserting itself with the quiet authority of a mineral specimen.

The great tradition of blown glass lamp-making in the mid-twentieth century drew simultaneously on the two great glass-working cultures of France and Italy. In Murano, off Venice, the centuries-old glassblowing workshops reinvented themselves for the post-war luxury market, producing sculptural table lamps in coloured glass that found their way into the finest Parisian and international interiors of the 1960s and 1970s. In France, the contemporaneous establishment of artisan glass workshops on the Côte d’Azur — most notably the Verrerie de Biot, founded in 1956 by Eloi Monod, whose thick, bubbly, richly coloured glass became an emblem of a certain elevated Mediterranean lifestyle — created a parallel tradition of blown glass lighting distinctly French in its sensibility. The attribution of this lamp to one or the other tradition reflects the close kinship of the two schools in this period.

In any setting, a lamp of this stature commands the room. Standing ninety-three centimetres tall, it brings the weight of a floor lamp to the table, its blue glass body asserting its presence whether lit or unlit, whether positioned in a corner to anchor a composition or placed centrally on a low table. It suits equally the Mediterranean interior — where the deep blue resonates with sea and sky — and the darker, more layered décor of a library or study, where its colour offers a saturated counterpoint to warm wood and leather.