Post by Admin on Nov 26, 2018 13:01:27 GMT -4
If money were no object, would you splurge over two million pounds on a designer lamp? Well somebody did. But was it worth it?….
At Pooky we bow to nobody when it comes to appreciating a lovely designer table lamp… except perhaps one person. That’s the unknown zillionaire who bought the lamp above at a Christie’s auction in New York, on 12 December 1997 for a cool $2.8 million.
It’s the Pink Lotus, made by Tiffany Studios in 1906. It’s very nice and all…But why so expensive? Well, the Pink Lotus has three things going for it: it’s unique, it has some historical significance, and it’s beautiful. But do those three things really add up to $2.8m? Here’s the evidence…
First, it is undoubtedly a one-off. The lamp was specially commissioned by the Wrigley family – the Chicago chewing gum magnates – in 1905. They liked collecting nice things (skyscrapers, baseball parks, ocean liners and so on) so a custom-made lamp didn’t make too big a dent in the finances.
However, objects from New York’s Tiffany Studios were pretty expensive even at the time. In the 1900s a Tiffany glass lamp could set you back over $700 – roughly the annual income of an average worker.
Which brings us to the historical significance.
Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1943), pictured above, is probably the most famous American exponent of Art Nouveau design. The eldest son of Charles Lewis Tiffany (founder of the Tiffany & Co store of Breakfast at Tiffany’s fame), he occupied an interesting niche at the intersection of art and big business. He was certainly an artist – creating all manner astounding works in stained glass – but he was also an expert marketer of his own products, particularly the glass lamps.
Tiffany lamps were – and are – renowned for their intricate artistry and for the innovative ‘copper foil’ technique, which involved edging individual pieces of cut glass in copper foil and soldering the whole together to create extremely detailed pieces. The patterns, inspired by the Arts & Crafts and the French Art Nouveau movements, are distinctive and gorgeous.
