Made by a sculptor whose name has not survived, which is exactly the kind of object this store likes most.

What we know comes from the private collector we bought it from: that the maker was a sculptor working on their own, and that the name has gone. The object itself confirms the story. The base is concrete, cast and worked by hand rather than moulded for production. The incised linked-diamond pattern runs around the body like marks made for their own sake. The textured glass on top sits almost like a crown. None of this is the language of product design. It is a sculptor solving the problem of a lamp by making one as if it were a small piece of sculpture.

That move, an artist building an everyday object, has a quiet history of its own. The same instinct put Alberto Giacometti to work on plaster lamps for Jean-Michel Frank in the 1930s and led Isamu Noguchi to his Akari lights a generation later: utility treated as another medium rather than as a constraint. We are not placing this piece in that company by attribution, only by spirit. It belongs to the same kind of thinking.

The age is uncertain, but not contemporary. The hand reads earlier than that, though without a maker we cannot pin it more closely. The honest description is a one-off sculptural lamp by an unknown sculptor, well made enough that the lost name becomes part of the appeal rather than a problem with the piece. It is in working order, tested and tagged for domestic use.