Antique Arts & Crafts Slag Glass Lamp - Bradley & Hubbard

North America, United States, Connecticut, Meriden, Bradley and Hubbard Manufacturing Company. A geometric cage of caramel-veined green glass, framed in metal latticework whose crisp verticals and chevrons announce the American Arts and Crafts idiom. The octagonal shade rises from a broad skirt of rectangular tiles punctuated by deep amethyst squares, its panels of slag glass swirling white, apple green, and ochre; the frame is spelter carried over a copper strike. A square-section brass stem lifts the shade above a hexagonal iron-weighted brass foot, marked B&H on the underside for the Bradley and Hubbard Manufacturing Company. Beneath the shade sit three sockets, each with its own pull-chain switch, allowing the light to be graduated one bulb at a time. The shade's interior is stamped "Patd Oct 20 08". The top finial is absent. Bradley and Hubbard, founded at Meriden, Connecticut in 1852 by Nathaniel Lyman Bradley and Walter Hubbard, became one of the great American manufacturers of lighting and cast metalwork, producing clocks, andirons, and inkstands alongside the kerosene and later electric lamps for which it is best remembered. By the first decade of the twentieth century the firm was the principal industrial rival to Tiffany Studios and Handel in the leaded-shade market, undercutting them by substituting geometrically cut slag glass for elaborate floral mosaics and cast spelter frames for bronze. The result is the disciplined, rectilinear vocabulary seen here, closer to Prairie School architecture than to Art Nouveau. The company was absorbed by the Charles Parker Company in 1940. Slag glass, opalescent sheet marbled by the introduction of a second molten batch, was prized precisely because its internal drift of color reads as pattern even when the lamp is unlit. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 161226

Estimate:$225

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