19th Century Oriental Japonisme Table Lamp

Provenance: Estate of Jules Verne
Material Cast two tone bronze
Date: Late 19th Century
Style: Japonisme
 
A finely detailed Oriental, castl columnar table lamp, featuring repousse and chasing of naturalistic forms in the Japonisme Style.
 
Provenance from the estate of Jules Verne. Made either for the European market or made by a notable designer from the Alliance des industries d’art it is indeed of a great quality and craftmanship and totally of its period.   'Japonisme' is a French term coined in the late nineteenth century to describe the craze for Japanese art and design in the West, following the forced reopening of foreign trade with Japan, the term is generally said to have been coined by the French critic Philippe Burty in the early 1870s. ‘Japonisme’ its is also refered to as  ‘Style 1900’, ‘Style Metro’, ‘Maison de l’ Art’ (Art Nouveau "House of the New Art") a style which ironically was in fact termed “Jules Verne”. So, very ‘Jules Verne’.
 
Jules Gabriel Verne b. 8 February 1828 – d. 24 March 1905 one of the great French novelists and poets, and playwrights,  one of the founding fathers of science fiction. Creator of the Voyages Extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, considering the technological advances of the time.
 
This lamp is visible in the late 19th Century photograph of the writer’s room at  Maison De Jules Verne, photo: Laurent Rousselin/Amienas Metropole. At his family home Maison de la Tour, Verne is known to have  used the smallest room in the house (which at the same time opened into a much more spacious library) as his study, and today there is an iron bed, an armchair and a desk with a globe - the writer's former possessions.
 
An exceptionally lamp with many stories of traveling to far flung places.
 
Rewired with PAT without compromising its integrity.
 
P.O.A