Crystal Table Lamp ‘Chardon’ with Red Silk Shade

A solid block of clear crystal beneath a deep red silk shade, this Mid-Century Modern table lamp was made in France by Daum in the 1950s and carries the house mark. The model is called Chardon, French for thistle, and the thistle heads spread across the crystal in bursts of fine radiating lines, like frost forming on a winter window.

After the war, Daum in Nancy left behind the coloured, etched glass of its Art Nouveau years and turned to clear crystal, thick and weighty, prized for the way it holds and bends light. Chardon belongs to that new chapter. The thistle has long been the emblem of Nancy, and here it becomes pure texture, worked into a block whose rough, faceted sides recall a fragment of mountain rock rather than anything cut by a machine. French design of the 1950s loved this meeting of nature and precision, and Daum’s crystal lamps of the period remain sought after by collectors.

The new shade is made from a Pierre Frey silk in a rich red, its slubbed weave catching the light in fine threads, with a white lining inside. Tapering in a clean trapezoid, it echoes the upright block below. Switched on in the evening, it turns the light warm and rosy while the crystal sparkles beneath it. By day the glass picks up the window light and scatters it across a console, a sideboard or a bedside table, where the thistles ask to be traced with a fingertip.