Most floor lamps ask you to look up. This one stops you halfway. Set into the brass column at eye level is a green jasperware ball, sage green with white classical figures standing out in relief. It is a small, deliberate piece of jewelry on an otherwise plain brass stem, and it is the whole reason this lamp is worth talking about.
Jasperware is unglazed stoneware colored through the body rather than painted on the surface, with the white reliefs applied separately by hand. The scene here speaks the standard neoclassical vocabulary, draped figures and a spreading tree, borrowed from Greek and Roman models and popular in English pottery from the late 1700s onward. Get close and you can make out the raised edge of each applied figure, a detail no printed decoration ever manages.
The rest of the lamp knows to stay out of the way. A slender fluted brass column rises fifty-two inches from a round stepped base, weighted to hold a tall lamp steady and narrow enough to tuck beside a chair without claiming floor space. The brass has darkened unevenly to a warm, low shine, which is exactly what brass is supposed to do when nobody has polished the life out of it.
The pleated shade is fresh and still in its wrapper, so the lamp is ready to switch on the day it comes home. Set it beside a reading chair, at the end of a sofa, or in a bedroom corner. At fifty-two inches it throws light on your book rather than your ceiling.
Come see it in person at Pollyanna’s Antiques in downtown Mt. Clemens, open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday from 10 to 4. The jasperware deserves a look from a foot away.