GinaC wrote:About the style -- I recently started reading "American Country Houses of the Thirties", originally published in 1932 as "American Country Houses of Today".
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/048 ... UTF8&psc=1This book has confirmed a gut feeling of mine, that in the 30's, there was a design movement that was looking back at farmhouses of the early part of the century for inspiration. Now I understand the design of my little 1939 house! It wasn't meant to look Art Deco, it was part of this "Country House" movement.
This lamp may be of a similar design inspiration.
Even though the correlation is seldom made, it's obvious that Dresser's designs were one of several influences to the Art Deco movement, particularly in the area of industrial design. For example, the two teapots on this page date to the late 1870s:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/christopher-dresser-teapots/However, looking at them without knowing the context, one would be tempted think they dated to the first wave of Art Deco from the mid 1920s to the very early 1930s. A lot of the small coffee pots of this era took their design cues from the Dresser pieces made 50 years earlier.
The country/rural style houses of the '30s up to just before WWII were a late addition to the Revival era that started in the very late 19th Century. I guess they figured they had Revival styles of Colonial, Neoclassical, Tudor, Spanish, Mediterranean, Norman, Renaissance, etc., etc., why not Rural America as well? People usually first think of Streamline design when they think of the late '30s, but I'd wager there were many more houses built in the Country style versus Streamline. Small and large appliances of the late '30s often had a Streamline appearance, though the houses they occupied usually weren't similarly styled. It's interesting how sometimes architectural and industrial design paralleled each other and at other times, they were opposite.
