Collection Spotlight: Elizabeth Eaton Burton: Three Masterworks of Lighting Design

Elizabeth Eaton Burton (1869-1937) was born in Paris, and spent her early years in Europe. In 1886 she came to the United States with her father who was an architect and landscape designer. Influenced by his eclectic melding of European sophistication and Japonesque sensibility she opened her own studio in Santa Barbara in 1896 producing items in leather and eventually metal. Revealing in her memoir years later that she saw herself as a designer first, teaching others to execute her designs, she was, as many of her Arts and Crafts era contemporaries, self-taught. Inspired heavily by nature, as seen in these three examples, which incorporate natural motifs and make use of California local materials like shells in their execution, Burton’s designs share many ideals with Arts and Crafts era objects. However, the graceful forms of these lamps are also modeled after French Art Nouveau decorative art of the time. Burton’s work melds the hand-crafts and natural motifs of the Arts and Crafts movement with the elongated, sinuous forms of Art Nouveau creating the perfect marriage of beauty and functionality harnessing electric light at the turn of the twentieth century.

View these and other extraordinary works in our third floor Lighting Gallery.