Antique Polychrome Table Lamp with Silk Lampshade, 1890s

Antique Dutch Delft polychrome table lamp by Royal Tichelaar Makkum, hand-painted on a ceramic baluster vase circa 1890 and converted to lighting by Amitābha Studio, with a new burnt-orange loose-pleat silk shade and a fabric-wrapped yellow cord. The tin-glazed earthenware (faience) base carries dense allover floral decoration in the Frisian Delft palette—blue, yellow, green, and iron-red flowering ornament on a white ground—with a chinoiserie sensibility that reads equally bohemian, eclectic, and traditional.

Newly wired for U.S. use; international plug customization available at no charge. Height includes the shade.

The base began as an antique vase from Royal Tichelaar Makkum, recognized as the oldest company in the Netherlands, working from the Frisian town of Makkum where a brickworks on the site is documented as early as 1572. The Tichelaar family has run the pottery since the seventeenth century and, from around 1890, turned from bricks and tiles toward decorative tin-glazed earthenware in the Delft tradition. This vase dates to that pivotal moment. It was sourced and transformed by Amitābha Studio—the Amsterdam-founded, now Sitges-based atelier using non-invasive methods that preserve the original ceramic, finished with handmade brass elements.

A specialized Makkum painter worked the entire surface freehand, covering a softly ribbed octagonal baluster body edge to edge with foliage, open six-petalled flowers, and clusters of round fruit—so densely filled that almost no white ground is left at rest. The warm reddish passages show the fine crazing characteristic of this glaze and palette, evidence of age and hand-firing rather than wear. The underside bears a hand-painted blue mark in the manner of the early Tichelaar Makkum monogram used from around 1890. The burnt-orange silk shade is a deliberate counterpoint to the cooler tones of the base, its loose pleats falling in soft, irregular folds that keep the composition relaxed rather than formal.