Chandelier, Lacquered Metal & Brass, Art Déco, French Work, circa 1935

Among the material dialogues that define French Art Déco, few are as precisely calibrated as that between lacquered metal and brass. The lacquer — applied to a formed metal body and fired to a hard, light-absorbent surface — provided the matte, tonally controlled ground demanded by the Modernist interior: a flat, colour-saturated field against which the polished brass fittings read with the crisp legibility of a Japanese print. This was a language borrowed consciously from the East, specifically from the lacquered furniture and objects of Jean Dunand, Eileen Gray and the japanning workshops of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, translated into the vocabulary of domestic lighting.

This chandelier exemplifies the horizontal plafonnier format that French ébénistes and luminairists of the 1930s preferred for the low-ceilinged salons and dining rooms of the inter-war apartment: at only 35 centimetres in height against 68.5 in diameter, its profile is emphatically flat, a disc of metal and light rather than a vertical cascade. The construction combines a lacquered metal body with brass armatures and fittings — each component finished with the attention to tolerance and surface that characterises the best Parisian atelier work of the period between the 1925 Exposition Internationale and the outbreak of war.

In today’s market, Art Déco lighting in this lacquer-and-brass combination occupies a position of recognised value: sufficiently mature to be unambiguously period, sufficiently restrained to read well in a contemporary interior. The horizontal disc form is particularly sympathetic to spaces where height is limited and a conventional chandelier would overwhelm. In excellent period condition. Diameter 68.5 cm, height 35 cm.