Western Lamp Shades

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Update your home décor with a unique and stylish western lamp shade. Often featuring traditional scenic designs, a western shade will bring a rustic touch to any room. Usually made from faux leather lookalike materials, they also feature visible stitching detail for a rural vibe. Whether you’re a fan of horses in the wild west or something more subtle to remind you of your favorite movie, we’ve selected a handful of the best western lamp shades below.

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Updated 12/07/2023

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Western Lamp Shades

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The era of the westward movement, the age of the cattle rancher and dusty settlements, along with the establishment of the railroads was relatively brief. But it spawned a lot of interesting artifacts that have been duplicated and expanded upon. Western lamp shades carry on the theme of the cowboy, the cattleman and the rodeo rider with shades and lamps that harken back to the twenty or so years that saw Europeans expanding from the Eastern seacoast toward the west. Television shows such as Bonanza and Rawhide sentimentalized the era, and it was further glamorized by more modern productions such as the movie Tombstone.

What Constitutes a Western Lamp Shade?

Since the movement west put many people into a land where they were on their own, far from cities and small towns where people could afford to specialize, they had to learn to manufacture items that they might have purchased from merchants when they were “back east.” Both pig skin and sheep skin can be tanned into fine leather that will let light through, so pig skin and parchment (another name for sheep skin) could be used as lamp shades. Metal would have been scarce, so the originals might have been stretched on hoops of willow or hickory – any tree that might have been flexible. Modern versions are stretched on metal forms, such as might be used for any lamp but laced with strips of leather as a sort of memory of the way things once might have been.

What are the popular themes depicted on western lamp shades?

Emulating More Affluent Westerners

Not all people who went west were cowboys, sheepherders or hard-scrabble farmers. Some got rich in various ways. A beautiful mica lampshade depicting a silhouette of a moose and evergreens is a reminder that there were ranchers and townspeople who developed fortunes in those short years.

Rodeo Riders

The memory of the westward movement is often kept alive by traveling or seasonal rodeos. The word rodeo comes from Spain, traveling through Mexico into the United States, means to surround or go around and originally referred to seasonal roundups of cattle. Today, rodeos are primarily contests that reflect the skills once needed to herd recalcitrant, long-horned cattle. Some of the lamps considered to be “western” are ordinary shades with scenes from historical or current rodeos – bucking horses, herds of cattle with those big, long horns, a vaquero with his range-riding gear. These are often accompanied by lamp bases that depict worn cowboy boots, barbed wire, saddles, rearing horses or wagon wheels.

How to make a DIY western lamp shade?

The west, like many cultures, focused on making do with the things that they had. One way to do this was to reuse the metal from tin cans. (tin cans were invented in 1910. The cowboy era was from around 1865 to 1880.) A can could be flattened and the sides pierce with a nail to make a shade that could surround a candle or a tallow lamp. Pierced tin lampshades that cast interesting shadows are a continuation of that custom.