Pairpoint Hand-Painted Oil Lamp, Pyramids, Palms C 1905

Pairpoint Monumental Hand-Painted Orientalist Oil Lamp, Pyramids, Palms c 1905
Rare oil lamp, USA, c. 1905. obverse-painted glass, patinated metal
Measures: 33½ height × 10 diameter in (85 × 25 cm) Provenance: Collection of Edward and Sheila Malakoff
Literature: Pairpoint Lamps, Malakoff, pg. 114. This piece is given the” rarity rating” of 1; the rarest of Pairpoint production. Purchase includes a copy of Malakoff text.
Pairpoint Glass Company is an American glass manufacturer based in Sagamore, Massachusetts. It is currently the oldest operating glass company in the United States. The company was founded by Deming Jarves in 1837 in South Boston, Massachusetts, as the Mount Washington Glass Works. In 1870, Mount Washington relocated to New Bedford, Massachusetts. In the 1880s, the company primarily produced art glass. In 1885, it introduced Burmese art glass, a translucent, heat reactive glass that shades from yellow at the bottom to pink at the top. The company became known for this type of glass, obtaining a British patent for it in 1886, and presenting a number of Burmese pieces to Queen Victoria.
In 1880, British silver designer Thomas Pairpoint (1838-1902) resigned his position as head designer at the Meriden Brittania Company and founded the Pairpoint Manufacturing Company, which was established in New Bedford as a silver manufacturer supplying Mount Washington with silver-plated metal mounts for its glass lamps and other products.In 1894, the two companies merged and in 1900 were renamed the Pairpoint Corporation.
The invention of the light bulb and the corresponding rise of the use of electricity was central to the company’s success in the late 19th century. In the early 20th century through the early 1930s, its distinctive glass lampshades gained international popularity.
Pairpoint is known for three kinds of glass lampshades, originally produced from the mid-1890s through the mid-1920s: reverse painted landscape shades (where the glass is hand painted on the inside surface so colors appear softly through the glass), blown out reverse painted shades, and ribbed reverse painted shades, mostly with floral designs and landscape scenes.In 1910, the company began using a spherical knop (or “bubble ball”) on some of its pieces, a technique involving trapping air bubbles inside a piece of glass in a symmetrical pattern, which can be applied to ice buckets, decanters, glassware, and other pierces. Pairpoint’s reverse painted lamps are generally considered to be the most popular and expensive of such lamps on the antique market. Rare Pairpoint lamps have been sold for six figures (USD).
More than 50 Pairpoint silver pieces from 1880 to 1929 are a part of the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum. These include pitchers, goblets and candlesticks. Early Pairpoint pieces are also a part of the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, including silver candlesticks from 1905, a rose glass bowl from 1898, and a glass vase ca. 1886-94. the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; and the New Bedford Museum of Glass. A 2011 exhibition at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, was titled Mt. Washington and Pairpoint: American Glass From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties. It told the story of the company and featured over 150 pieces from the 1880s to the 1930s, including art glass, cut glass, kerosene and electric lamps, and decorative tableware.