kerosene lamp

Thomas Webb and Sons, which produced high-quality cameo-cut Art Glass, also manufactured fashionable kerosene lamps in collaboration with Hinks and Sons. This elaborate lamp consists of two large blown spheres, used as both stand and shade, made of ruby glass cased with white glass carved in a floral and geometric pattern. The relatively opaque shade makes this object a less effective source of light, and it suggests that the lamp was treasured more as a showpiece—displaying a delicately carved overlay pattern and reflecting the best of Victorian taste—than as an illuminator of a dark late 19th-century parlor. This lamp is emblematic of modern advances in lighting and consequent changes in domestic life, and it also presents the lighting fixture as sculpture. Its intricate decoration of cameo carving, a technique that reached unprecedented levels of sophistication at that time, shows an East Asian influence. The ornamentation of the stand combines honeycombs and lotus leaves overlaid with peonies, symbols known from Oriental lacquer, carved wood, and textiles. Employed as a national symbol in China and Taiwan, the peony is celebrated as a flower of riches and honor, while the hexagonal shape of honeycombs and the geometric leaves are often found as a background ornament or as decoration on secondary surfaces. The burner is signed “HINKS & SON’S / PATENT”; the small white glass handle is impressed “HINKS’S / DUPLEX / PATENT.” The lamp was included in a cameo glass exhibition presented at The Corning Museum of Glass in 1982 (Sidney M. Goldstein, Leonard S. Rakow, and Juliette K. Rakow, Cameo Glass: Masterpieces from 2000 Years of Glassmaking, Corning: the museum, 1982, cat. no. 90, pp. 86 and 119). This object is also described and depicted in Catherine M. V. Thuro, Oil Lamps II: Glass Kerosene Lamps, Toronto: Thorncliffe House, and Paducah, Kentucky: Collector Books, 1994, p. 141.