
Torchiere lamps are like small torches.Paired lamps come in sets of two to help you create a symmetrical look, such as flanking a large mirror over an entryway table or for placing on either side of a sofa.These lamps work well anywhere you want to save space while still providing light, such as on console tables or petite end tables. They work well on buffets because their bases have relatively small footprints, leaving plenty of room for dishes of food and other decor. Buffet lamps are thin and tall, and their bases often look like candlesticks.Consider one of these shapes or themes as you start choosing your lamps. Because table lamps can be decorative, you can really have fun choosing a style that speaks to you. You can use them for light reading, but they're intended more to provide decoration and ambient light than to help you focus in on a specific task. Table lamps are typically meant to work as accent and reading lamps. What are some common lamps styles I can choose? Review the below to help you make the right choice for your lighting needs. There are many styles and features to take into account. Whether you need extra illumination for reading or creating a relaxed ambiance for unwinding at the end of the day, a few well-chosen table lamps can make it easier to brighten and enjoy your home. It is interesting to contrast its graphic quality with the impressionistic fluidity of her later work, including Still life 1933-34, also in the Wesfarmers Collection.Your Top Questions About Table Lamps Answered Painted in tempera and oil on board, with black outlines clearly visible, O’Connor’s Still life with lamp is grounded in drawing, driven by design, and clearly aligned with the artist’s applied arts practice. In this still life, the newspaper may be simply a prop among many, but its presence on the table does reinforce a rich sense of time and place. Mauclair was a virulent anti-modernist who lamented the depredations of foreign influence on French art, and later became a champion of Hitler’s campaign against ‘degenerate art’. Its art critic, Camille Mauclair, featured prominently. Launched in 1928, and carrying the same title as Jean-Paul Marat’s journal of the French Revolution, L’Ami du peuple was a far-right populist paper with a huge circulation. Playing cards are strewn on the table, and buried amongst it all is a newspaper. Adding texture to the surface of the picture, thick patches of white and yellow paint give a sheen to the red tomatoes and make the brass lamp gleam with reflected light and facets of colour. The strokes of colour in the fabrics are flatly applied in earthy, autumnal tones that recall the North African textiles influential in French fashion of the day. O’Connor’s own fabric designs are draped behind and across the table, creating a geometric background for the organic shapes of the fruit and vegetables. The table tilts precariously in the flattened picture plane, and the commotion of intersecting lines – chairs, stair, table edge, fabrics – gives the image a brilliant exuberance. This scene in the artist’s flat in Montparnasse has the intimacy of a close-up, as the top of the lamp disappears out of the frame and the eye is drawn down to the little table and the objects on its surface.


Those two strands of her career in the 1920s combine in this major work, which is one of the treasures of the Wesfarmers Collection. Meanwhile, in her painting practice, she turned to the still life. O’Connor designed and painted textiles and wallpapers, created window displays, and decorated domestic objects. On a trip back to Australia in 1927, she took commissions from David Jones and Grace Brothers.

During the 1920s, she worked as a freelance designer, with the luxury department store Galeries Lafayette among her Parisian clients. Having left Western Australia in 1906, O’Connor spent much of her life in Paris. Women, empowered in the domains of the personal and the fashionable, were important players in the nexus between domestic design and the modernist principles of painting. In the bold age of the 1920s, fabrics, furnishing, and objet d’arts were patterned with motifs often abstracted from natural forms, and there was a daring vitality to the embrace of colour. The interplay between decorative arts and fine arts is vibrantly present in this bustle of colour and tumble of objects.
