Pair of Chinoiserie Table Lamps, Printed Wood & Gilt Metal, Pagoda Shades, French Work, circa 1970

This pair of table lamps embodies the enduring French fascination with the Far East: their columnar bodies are clad in printed wood panels featuring lacquered chinoiserie motifs — pagodas, stylised foliage, and pavilions rendered in gilt against a dark ground — while structural elements in gilt metal reinforce the orientalising vocabulary. Each lamp is crowned by a pagoda-form shade that echoes the architectural silhouette of the base, creating a coherent decorative ensemble of striking verticality.

The taste for chinoiserie — that playful European reimagining of Far Eastern aesthetics — has animated French interior decoration since the seventeenth century, finding its most exuberant expression at Versailles and in the lacquered furniture of the Ancien Régime. The 1970s witnessed a sophisticated revival: as French decorators such as Henri Samuel and Madeleine Castaing rehabilitated the eighteenth-century interior, chinoiserie motifs returned to the finest Parisian apartments, this time interpreted with a lighter, more graphic touch suited to modern living. These lamps belong precisely to this current of refined historicism.

Presented in a well-matched pair, they offer an immediate decorative impact: placed on console tables, on either side of a chimney breast, or flanking a daybed, they introduce warmth, exoticism, and pictorial richness. The combination of gilt metal and printed wood — lacquer-like in its effect if not in its material — gives them a substance that sits comfortably alongside authentic eighteenth-century lacquerwork as well as contemporary interiors seeking a touch of opulence.