Black Opaline Table Lamp By Jacques Adnet

One of the most elegant and innovative 20th-century French furniture designers, Jacques Adnet created a simple, unadorned signature style that is both trim and vigorous. He began his career in the heyday of the Art Deco era, and in the 1950s, in association with Hermès, created chairs, lamps, desks and other pieces that employed slender metal frames clad in stitched saddle leather. With such furnishings, Adnet brought a fashion sensibility to design and decor that had not been seen since the 1920s prime of the great Paris couturier-decorator Paul Poiret.

Adnet was born in a provincial town in Burgundy, where he studied design before moving, along with his twin brother, Jean, to Paris to study at the École des Arts Décoratifs. After their graduation in the early 1920s, the brothers were hired to work in the decorative-arts atelier of the department store Galeries Lafayette, under the direction of Maurice Dufrêne, an Art Deco master who developed a singularly robust and opulent style. Both Adnets showed their work at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes — the design fair from which the term Art Deco is derived. 

In 1928, Jacques Adnet took charge of the struggling La Compagnie des Arts Français, a decorative-arts firm founded by Louis Süe and André Mare that created modern furnishings that bore traces of 18th-century styling. Adnet immediately took the company in a different direction. He developed a simple lithe and lean look that incorporated industrial materials such as metal and glass, along with exotic woods and finishes such as parchment and sharkskin.

Adnet’s furniture begs to be described in terms of personalities: charming faux-bamboo side tables, suave chrome lighting and urbane club chairs. His most noted pieces, which feature sleek metal frames wrapped in Hermès leather, have a character all their own — smooth, elegant and self-assured, they inhabit a room with the same wit and grace as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve.

Find vintage Jacques Adnet furniture for sale on 1stDibs.

Well-crafted antique and vintage table lamps do more than provide light; the right fixture-and-table combination can add a focal point or creative element to any interior.

Proper table lamps have long been used for lighting our most intimate spaces. Perfect for lighting your nightstand or reading nook, table lamps play an integral role in styling an inviting room. In the years before electricity, lamps used oil. Today, a rewired 19th-century vintage lamp can still provide a touch of elegance for a study.

After industrial milestones such as mass production took hold in the Victorian era, various design movements sought to bring craftsmanship and innovation back to this indispensable household item. Lighting designers affiliated with Art Deco, which originated in the glamorous roaring ’20s, sought to celebrate modern life by fusing modern metals with dark woods and dazzling colors in the fixtures of the era. The geometric shapes and gilded details of vintage Art Deco table lamps provide an air of luxury and sophistication that never goes out of style.

After launching in 1934, Anglepoise lamps soon became a favorite among modernist architects and designers, who interpreted the fixture as “a machine for lighting,” just as Le Corbusier had reimagined the house as “a machine for living in.” The popular task light owed to a collaboration between a vehicle-suspension engineer by the name of George Carwardine and a West Midlands springs manufacturer, Herbert Terry & Sons. 

Some mid-century modern table lamps, particularly those created by the likes of Joe Colombo and the legendary lighting artisans at Fontana Arte, bear all the provocative hallmarks associated with Space Age design. Sculptural and versatile, the Louis Poulsen table lamps of that period were revolutionary for their time and still seem innovative today. 

If you are looking for something more contemporary, industrial table lamps are demonstrative of a newly chic style that isn’t afraid to pay homage to the past. They look particularly at home in any rustic loft space amid exposed brick and steel beams.

Before you buy a desk lamp or table lamp for your living room, consider your lighting needs. The Snoopy lamp, designed in 1967, or any other “banker’s lamp” (shorthand for the Emeralite desk lamps patented by H.G. McFaddin and Company), provides light at a downward angle that is perfect for writing, while the Fontana table lamp and the beloved Grasshopper lamp by Greta Magnusson-Grossman each yield a soft and even glow. Some table lamps require lampshades to be bought separately.

Whether it’s a classic antique Tiffany table lamp, a Murano glass table lamp or even a bold avant-garde fixture custom-made by a contemporary design firm, the right table lamp can completely transform a room. Find the right one for you on 1stDibs.