Lighting devices

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2004 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The firm founded by Edward F. Caldwell and his partner Victor F. von Lossberg in New York City in 1895 became one of the leading manufacturers of high-quality lighting devices and desk-top accessories in bronze, silver, iron, brass, and copper. According to Jeni L. Sandberg, the author of an article about the company published in this magazine in February 1998 (pp. 310-319), the firm's client list comprised a "who's who" of the Edwardian era and included the architects McKim, Mead and White, Carrere and Hastings, Cass Gilbert, and Horace Trumbauer, and the financiers and industrialists Frederick W. Vanderbilt, Henry Clay Frick, Henry Morrison Flagler, Payne Whitney, and Andrew Carnegie. An enormous cache of the firm's papers consisting of photographs and beautifully rendered and hand-colored drawings is to be found in the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.

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As Sandberg relates, Caldwell and Company worked closely with the architects and interior designers who were largely responsible for commissioning the lighting for any building they were designing. Since the budgets for these fixtures could run into tens of thousands of dollars for a single residence, a separate contract was often called for. Supplying homeowners with traditional lighting devices was the stock-in-trade of the firm's early years. Later, manufacturing lighting fixtures for public buildings saw the company through financially lean years like those during the Great Depression.

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The range of styles the firm offered was large. It would replicate any antique fixture a client desired, working from photographs, drawings, or pattern books. During the depression, the firm made many fixtures for Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia. Caldwell was conversant with historical styles and traveled to England, France, and Italy to study historic lighting in situ. Museums were another source for inspiration and at least one employee, Albert Nesle, sketched lighting devices on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Perhaps slightly more imaginative were the fixtures the company designed between the 1920s and the 1940s for buildings in the art deco and early modernist styles. These were as sleek and brilliant as one would expect and were beautifully suited for New York art deco landmarks such as Radio City Music Hall and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where they are still in place.

Coming full circle, today there is a firm in New York City, Chameleon Lighting, that manufactures reproductions of Caldwell's reproductions as well as original lighting devices. Robert Degiarde (as things would have it, a grandson of Albert Nesle) and John Harvey founded the firm a little more than ten years ago and it has recently added the Caldwell fixtures to its offerings. They are made in Western Europe, mostly in France, and are cast in bronze using the lost-wax method. Among the available finishes are gold, nickel, brass, and chrome. When necessary, some alterations have been made in order to comply with today's stringent electrical codes. The reproductions of Caldwell's American fixtures range from the colonial period to the 1940s, while those drawing on French and English models are mostly of pieces made during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Chameleon Lighting will undertake custom work as well. The firm, which is open to the trade only, maintains a Web site--www.chameleon59.com--where photographs of its offerings may be seen.

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Reproductions of lighting devices from originals made by Edward F. Caldwell and Company in the early twentieth century and recently manufactured by Chameleon Lighting of New York City.

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