Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Private Collection, Chicago, 2002-2006

Founded in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1902, Charles P. Limbert & Co. was one of the most successful and long-lasting manufacturers of Arts and Crafts furniture and lighting in the United States. Beginning his career as a representative for other furniture companies, Charles Limbert developed an innovative approach to advertising and distribution that marketed his wares to a much wider audience. Looking to a variety of stylistic sources, including the Wiener Werkstätte, the Viennese Secessionists, Gustav Stickley and the Prairie School, Limbert produced an extensive line of furnishings that beautifully expressed the qualities of harmonious design and high-quality construction underpinning the Arts and Crafts movement.

Responding to growing demand, Limbert expanded his production capabilities in 1906 by building a new factory in the small town of Holland, a community of Dutch ancestry located twenty-five miles southwest of Grand Rapids. An admirer of what he perceived as a uniquely Dutch temperament, one enamored with the plain, the straightforward, and the functional, Limbert drew inspiration from Dutch decorative arts, like medieval and folk furniture, as well as distinctly Netherlandish imagery, such as windmills, clogs and canals. In conjunction with the relocation, Limbert began using the appellation, Holland Dutch Arts and Crafts, which aimed at distinguishing his company’s stylistic and historical derivation from that of other American Arts and Crafts designers and workshops. At the same time, Limbert’s Holland factory was a model for the utopian ideal of the craft guild because workers were provided with a healthy, safe environment and amenities inconceivable before the advent of the labor movement.

Primarily a manufacturer of furniture, Limbert demonstrated his dedication to the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement by expanding the company’s product line to include lighting fixtures. A primary tenet of the movement centered on creating a harmonious home environment, which resulted in a need for functional objects like candlesticks, vases and planters rendered in the simple and straightforward vernacular of the Arts and Crafts style. Limbert offered table lamps and hanging lanterns for the first time in 1911, publishing a supplement to accompany his fourteenth sales catalogue.

Rendered in a variety of styles, ranging from Stickley-influenced mission to Secessionist, the lamps were given either hammered copper or quarter sawn oak bases. The wood bases were certainly manufactured by Limbert; however, as the factory did not include a copper shop, it has been speculated that the copper bases were commissioned from the nearby Stickley Brothers workshop. Although shades made from mica do exist, both types of bases were generally topped with finely wrought copper cut-out shades silhouetted against colored glass.

A rare example of Limbert lighting, this table lamp features an exquisite pierced shade with two colors of opalescent glass and an octagonal base made from hand-hammered copper. Concerned with a high quality of craftsmanship and a return to hand production, Arts and Crafts designers frequently left visible hammermarks to evidence that the work had been created by a person’s hand rather than a machine. Conveying the same idea, the four distinctive loop handles each bear clearly defined chase marks. The structural components of the lamp, such as the rivets affixing the handles to the base that would have previously been covered by decoration, are left visible in the Arts and Crafts style to call attention to the beauty of utility.

The use of cut-outs is a signature characteristic of Limbert’s furniture designs. Seen most frequently on the backs of chairs or along the legs of a table, the pierced shapes were inspired by Glasgow architect and designer Charles Renee Mackintosh. Drawing on this influence, Limbert applied the notion of the cut-out to the design of his lighting fixtures, in the end creating a completely distinctive type of lamp. The dye-stamped copper silhouette endows the simplified, monumental form with dimension and dynamism. Incorporating panes of red and green glass, the shade of this Limbert lamp depicts a man as he pulls a barge along a canal. The scene’s Dutch identity can be ascertained from the shape of the man’s shoes, which display the upward pointing toes and round heels characteristic of wooden clogs. The upper panels, the red color of which evokes a sense of the setting sun, feature the profiles of migrating birds and stylized clouds hovering in the sky. The Dutch theme is continued by the overall shape of the lamp: its thick base and expansive canopy are suggestive of a Dutch tower windmill with wide blades, an idea which is furthered by the presence of windows on the bases of similar lamps.