Round Brass and Glass Three-Tier Guéridon, Maison Jansen, France, circa 1940

Founded in Paris in 1880 by the Dutch-born Jean-Henri Jansen, and transformed under the direction of Georges Boudin from the 1920s onward into one of the great arbiters of international decorative taste, Maison Jansen supplied furnishings to the most prestigious private residences, embassies, and royal palaces of the twentieth century. The firm’s genius lay in its capacity to translate classical French forms into the contemporary idiom without sacrificing the dignity and permanence that distinguished its finest work from mere fashionable novelty. In the 1930s and 1940s, this translation frequently found expression in the marriage of brass — warm, luminous, and associable both with antiquity and with mid-century modernism — and glass, the material that above all others allowed light to pass through rather than simply reflect it.

This slender guéridon, its three circular glass shelves supported by a delicate brass frame of classical proportion, is a characteristic product of Jansen’s mature Art Déco vocabulary. The form is ancient — the guéridon, descended from the classical tripod and the Renaissance torchère, is one of the most enduring types in French furniture — but the material treatment is entirely of its moment. The transparency of the glass shelves allows the brass structure to be read as a pure linear composition: a vertical axis resolved into three horizontal planes, each plane open to the space it occupies. The object casts no shadow on itself; it seems instead to organise light.

At 31.5 cm in diameter and 80.5 cm tall, this guéridon occupies the intimate register: it is the scale of a bedside or salon accent piece, perfectly proportioned to carry a lamp, a vase, or a single precious object. The combination of dimensional restraint, material quality, and the clarity of Jansen’s formal logic gives this modest-seeming piece a presence well beyond its physical scale — a characteristic quality of the best Jansen production, for which small objects were never small in ambition.