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The swelling of the lamp body is worked as a stylised artichoke: a ring of overlapping bracts, each with a nested inner sheath and a raised central spine, caught at the moment before it opens. The motif runs down into a collar of upright leaves at the spreading foot, and up into the neck, where the same bracts stretch and narrow into a fluted column.
The glaze is a soft butter yellow, laid on thickly. It pools and deepens in the recesses of the relief and thins toward cream along the raised edges, so the modelling reads even at a distance. The giltwood base is original to the lamp and carries its own worn gilding. The shade is new — gathered coral silk, wide and shallow — finished with a twisted gold fabric-wrapped cord.
The piece is attributed to Cerámicas Bondia of Manises and to the Casa Pupo line rather than factory-marked, which is normal for these lamps: they were shop goods, not signed studio pieces, and almost none of them left Manises with a maker's mark.
About Casa Pupo and Manises
Casa Pupo was not a factory but a shop. Geoffrey Dobson and José Casasús opened it on Pimlico Road in 1960 to import Spanish ceramics into London, and most of what it sold came from Manises, the pottery town outside Valencia — so much so that collectors have called this kind of lamp a Casa Pupo ever since: glazed ceramic in a single saturated colour, heavily modelled in relief, standing on a turned base of gilded wood. Manises itself has made pottery since the fourteenth century, when it was Europe's foremost source of lustreware and supplied both the papacy and the Aragonese crown. That trade faded, but the town remained a ceramic centre, and by the mid-twentieth century its workshops were producing decorative wares and lamp bases in exactly this kind of colour. Cerámicas Bondia was among the most prestigious of those houses, and one of Casa Pupo's suppliers.