Antique Seamstress or Linen-maker's Lamp... Important

Antiques : Lamps, Lighting

 

This is a Veritas Lamp Works of Germany kerosene Lamp called a seamstress or Linen-maker's lamp. These lamps are very rare and I am not using the word lightly. I get very irritated when sellers use words like that indiscriminately. I have most of the better books on Antiques but have not been able to find anything about them and when I checked on Google, I could not find anything either. I do know that the lady who owned this was very wealthy and when she was an active buyer over 25 years ago, she paid $2,750.00 for it at auction. The previous owner is a lady of 92 years young, did all of the work in setting up her household auction and on the eve of her auction, fell on the front steps of her home and broke her hip. I would have loved to meet her because everything at her auction reeked of exceptional taste and quality of which this lamp is an example. I did look up the Veritas lamp company and found out that they started business in the 1850's. I believe that this is one of their earlier pieces. The lamp measures 17 3/4" , 9" in diameter, and 11" wide, handle to handle. The shade itself is 6" diameter at the insert, and measures 10 5/8" tall and 9 3/4" in diameter. The chimney is not original to the lamp, in fact there was not one with it at the auction, so I put an Aladdin chimney in it as it was the only one I had that was tall enough. There are absolutely no chips, cracks, scratches or any other type of damage to this lamp. Any imperfections that you see on the pictures are either reflections, glare, or dust on my camera lens. The hand blown glass shade with the etched design is manually draped as you can see in the pictures. This is something that is extremely hard to accomplish as a blower and have it come out uniform in design all of the way around. The previous owner always kept the brass of the lamp well polished and cleaned so it is nice and shiny, unfortunately when one does this, they choose not to let an age patina accumulate. I once had an appraiser from Southeby's in my store. I asked him if he collected anything. He did not answer my question but he said something that has stuck with me and that I think about every day. He said, in a really cute foreign accent, "If people would only quit buying the $5 and $10 collectible items, save their money and buy something more expensive, then, in the end, they will have something of great value." This lamp fits that description.......Happy Collecting!!!!

Item ID: vlo1733