Model 32391 Brass and Bakelite Table Lamp

A gentle, lantern-like presence for a desk or side table, this Scandinavian Modern table lamp, model 32391, was designed by Bertil Brisborg for Nordiska Kompaniet in Sweden in the 1940s. Brass and Bakelite give it its bones, a slender dark stem rising from a stepped brass foot to a broad, softly textured shade crowned with a small brass ring.

In the 1940s Swedish design was softening the hard edges of functionalism, and Nordiska Kompaniet, the Stockholm department store with its own design studios and workshops, was one of the places where that warmer modernism took shape. Brisborg’s lamp belongs to that moment. Its form is plain and purposeful, a column beneath a wide hat that sends the light down onto the table where it is needed. Yet the details carry a sense of ceremony. Brass collars ring the stem, the foot rises in neat steps, and the finial sits on top like a small piece of jewellery, a reminder that Swedish Modern never lost its love of good materials and careful making.

Years of use have given the brass a deep, honeyed patina, darker in the recesses and bright where hands have touched it. The shade has a fine, sand-coloured grain, almost like eggshell, and when the lamp is on its pale underside turns the light soft and golden. Set it on a writing desk or beside a reading chair, and in the evening it gathers a warm pool of light around a book, a cup of coffee, a few letters, while the rest of the room settles into shadow.