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About the Item
Designed by Eileen Gray for the French Jumo company and dating to the 1930’s this very stylish lamp is made from two primary components which are bakelite and metal. Superb mushroom shape enamelled metal shade with copper silver accents and finial. Condition is excellent with minimal signs of age. Ideal for desks, centre tables etc, beautiful ambient lighting. For stability there is cast iron in the base. B22 lamp holders. The bakelite on this lamp is brown . Currently wired for EU countries, we can provide an adaptor on request to save re-wiring.
Bio
Kathleen Eileen Moray Gray (9 August 187831 October 1976) was an Irish architect and furniture designer and a Pioneer of the Modern Movement in architecture. Born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland in 1878, Eileen Gray spent her childhood in London and was among the first women to be admitted to the Slade School of Art in London, where she took up painting in 1898 before undergoing an apprenticeship in a London lacquer workshop. Gray died in 1976, at the age of 98, in Paris.
Born: 9 August 1878, Enniscorthy, Ireland.
Died: 31 October 1976, Paris, France.Creator: Eileen Gray (Designer)Dimensions: Height: 18.9 in (48 cm)Diameter: 11.82 in (30 cm)Power Source: Plug-inVoltage: 220-240vLampshade: IncludedStyle: Art Deco (Of the Period)Materials and Techniques: Bakelite,MetalPlace of Origin: FrancePeriod: Mid-20th CenturyDate of Manufacture: 1930Condition: GoodWear consistent with age and use.Seller Location: Devon, GBReference Number: 1stDibs: LU2447342604802Shop All Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray
Designer, artist and architect Eileen Gray was one of the most fascinating creative figures of the 20th century. Her body of work includes lustrous lacquered pieces her Dragons chair set an auction record for modern furniture ($28 million) at the 2009 sale of the Yves Saint Laurent estate and sleek chrome furnishings that rival the work of Le Corbusier and the members of the Bauhaus as exemplars of pure, modernist design.
The independent and unconventional daughter of Irish landed gentry, Gray studied painting at Londons Slade School of Fine Art in her early twenties before moving to Paris in 1906 to pursue her artistic dreams. Gray had become captivated by lacquerware after seeing an exhibit in the Victoria Albert Museum, and in Paris persuaded an expatriate Japanese master of the painstaking process, Seizo Sugawara, to teach her. Within a few years, Gray had become known among the cognoscenti for her sculptural lacquered furnishings, which she incorporated into the homes of interior design clients.
Gray was ever evolving as a designer. By the early 1920s she was creating geometric works that embodied the essence of Art Deco and the nascent modernist design movement. Some pieces such as her Bricks screen, an assemblage of pivoting rectangular panels employ the planar forms favored by Gerrit Rietveld and other De Stijl architects of the Netherlands. Others feature the tubular chrome framing used by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. These include the Bibendum chair named for the resemblance of its semicircular back and armrest to the character known in English as the Michelin Man and the adjustable E 1027 side table, conceived in 1927 for the interiors of a stark white villa she designed for herself in the South of France.
Never a self-promoter, Gray drifted out of the limelight in the 1930s. Interest in her work was revived in the early 70s, however, when the estates of her early clients came to auction. Her original lacquer pieces are the most coveted, but, as the sale of the Dragons chair shows, are rare and extremely expensive.
None of Grays designs were made in large numbers until, a few years before her death, she granted a production license. These pieces range in price from $1,000 to $2,500, depending on furniture type and condition. Grays work has become iconic of practical and elegant modernist design. Yet, as you will see on 1stDibs, many of her creations have a simplicity that makes them welcome even in a traditional setting.
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