Lucite Table Lamp with Horse Figures, in the Style of Maison Lalique, French Work, circa 1970

René Lalique (1860–1945) stands as one of the supreme figures of the French decorative arts. Beginning his career as a jeweller of extraordinary refinement in the Art Nouveau era, creating pieces of surpassing beauty for Sarah Bernhardt and the most discerning collectors of the Belle Époque, Lalique underwent a remarkable creative transformation after the First World War, turning his genius to the manufacture of pressed, moulded, and frosted glass on an industrial scale. His glassworks at Wingen-sur-Moder, established in 1921, produced some of the most celebrated objects of the Art Déco period: vases, perfume bottles, light fittings, and decorative panels in a formal language at once modern and deeply rooted in the natural world. Among his most admired motifs were horses — powerful, muscular, their manes flowing — which appeared in celebrated vases and panels that have become icons of twentieth-century design.

This table lamp, in lucite moulded with horse figures, invokes that celebrated Lalique tradition through the medium of plexiglass, the material whose optical clarity and light-diffusing properties most closely approach those of Lalique’s frosted crystal. The horses are rendered with expressive sculptural force, their bodies caught in dynamic movement, the translucency of the lucite allowing the lamp to be illuminated from within and projecting the equine forms in radiant silhouette. At thirty-one centimetres in height, the lamp is of intimate proportions but considerable presence — a collector’s piece that brings the elegance of the Lalique tradition into a domestic setting.

The reference to Lalique in French decorative arts of the 1970s reflects the sustained fascination of that decade with the great Art Déco masters, a period in which the first generation of Lalique objects was beginning to be seriously collected and Maison Lalique itself was active in producing new work in the established tradition. This lamp, produced in the spirit and aesthetic of that great house, is an attractive and characterful piece that speaks with warmth to the collector of French Mid-Century Modern decorative arts.