Highlights











































Description

Here is a truly splendid little 1930s enamel square powder compact to add to your Art Deco collection. The lid has a pretty design of red and white flowers, green leaves withred and green berries interconnected with thorny stems criss-crossing the whole lid - what an interesting piece of 1930s design !!

This slim tiny powder compact measures 6cms square and just under 0.5cm thick (2 3/8" x 3/16" ). The reverse is plain cream colour, which has a few surface scratches but nothing major, and the inside contains the original and unused sifter and powder puff.
The mirror is clear and in very good condition indeed. So the overall condition of this lovel;y compact is very good indeed.

It is stiff to open - you have to push the right hand lip up and the left hand ridge down, and it might need a thumbnail into the crack on the left hand side to force it apart. I think this will get easier to open with use, but remember, this was probably made just before the advent of the press-catch which made compacts a lot easier to open. These had to be stiff in order to prevent them coming open accidentally, and spilling all that loose powder everywhere -just imagine the mess !!

I have no information regarding who made this, but it is very unusual and very attractive. The Art Deco era brought out a lot of really beautiful graphic designs like this, which are now extremely collectible.

ART DECO STYLE
Art Deco is the popular style of visual arts, architecture and design that first appeared in France just before World War I. Art Deco influenced the design of buildings, furniture, jewellery, fashion, cars, movie theatres, trains, ocean liners, and everyday objects such as radios and vacuum cleaners. It took its name, short for 'Les Arts Du00e9coratifs', from the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris in 1925. It combined modern styles with fine craftsmanship and rich materials. During its heyday, Art Deco represented luxury, glamour, exuberance, and faith in social and technological progress.

The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean geometric shapes, often with a u201cstreamlined` look; ornament that is also geometric, or stylised from natural forms, and unusually varied, often expensive materials, including man-made plastics, especially Bakelite, in addition to natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and rock crystal). Though Art Deco objects were rarely mass-produced, the characteristic features of the style reflected admiration for the modernity of the machine and for the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects (e.g., relative simplicity, symmetry, and unvaried repetition of elements)