Vase With Lake Landscape - Ets Gallé

Etablissements GALLE
Vase with lake landscape

Multi-layered glass vase
with lake landscape decoration cleared with acid
powdered decor in interlayer
Perfect condition

France
early 20th century
height 22 cm

Biography :
Émile Gallé (1846-1904) is one of the most outstanding figures of the applied arts of his time and one of the pioneers of Art Nouveau, founder and first president of the School of Nancy in 1901 After his apprenticeship in the glass trades at Meisenthal, and ceramics at the Faïencerie de Saint-Clément, Emile Gallé was associated with his father's earthenware and glassware trading and decoration business from 1867. he who represented his father at the Universal Exhibition of 1867 in Paris where he obtained an honorable mention for glassware and at the Universal and International Exhibition of 1872 in Lyon where he obtained a gold medal in class 33 (porcelain and crystals). His approach is not simply theoretical, he is not afraid to learn about blowing. He adds to this a good knowledge of cabinetmaking and above all the family passion for the natural sciences and more particularly for plants, which leads him to drawing. Gallé is in Nancy the pupil of Dominique-Alexandre Godron, naturalist and doctor. He carries out studies on plants, animals, insects. He was elected secretary of the Société Centrale d'Horticulture de Nancy in 1877. The same year, Emile Gallé took over the family business and extended his activities to cabinetmaking in 1885. Already noticed at the Exposition de la Terre and Glass in 1884, Gallé was consecrated at the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889 with three awards for his ceramics, his glassware and his furniture (including a Grand Prix for his glassware), where he notably celebrated the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and therefore develops, through its symbolic decorations, the theme of patriotism. On this occasion, Gallé was made an officer of the Legion of Honor. From this date, Gallé intensely developed his technical and aesthetic research on glass work, a field in which he developed and created new manufacturing processes. His glass works were designed in Meisenthal until 1894, when he opened a crystal works which was set on fire in May 1894 in his company in Nancy. Emile Gallé's research resulted in the filing of two patents in 1898, for "a kind of decoration and patina on crystal" and "a kind of glass and crystal marquetry" by depositing small inclusions of glass in the molten paste. His pieces are then reworked by engraving, with a wheel for the most precious, with hydrofluoric acid for the most common, his engraver-decorators thus releasing a cameo decoration on a doubled or multi-layered glass. After the death of Emile Gallé in 1904, his glassworks continued to produce until 1936. Each piece bears Gallé's signature with hundreds of variations.