Lighting

Lighting is how a period reaches the ceiling. The Arts and Crafts workshop made a lantern, Art Nouveau made a lamp with a plant growing up its stem, Art Deco put chrome in the base and a stepped shade on top, and the mid-century designers treated the bulb as something to hide entirely. A single shelf of lamps reads as a timeline.

The material history runs alongside the style. Gas gave way to electricity around 1900, which changed the shade from an open flame guard to a diffuser; glass became the dominant material because it could be coloured, and by the 1960s moulded plastic replaced it. The wiring is therefore part of the object rather than a detail.

Read lighting by the original parts. Shades, glass and fittings are the pieces that get lost, and a lamp that has kept its own is worth several that have been rewired to a modern socket.

Before 1900 the lamp is a converted fixture: gas or oil bodies adapted to electricity, with glass shades that were designed for flame.

1900–1935 is the glass and metal phase — Tiffany, Gallé, Daum, and the Deco chrome base — where the shade is the object.

1945 onward the bulb disappears into the design: bent steel, plastic, and the lamps that are shapes rather than fittings.