Wine Carafe - Cristallerie Val Saint-lambert - Model: Pyramid - Period: 20th Century

This is a delightful blue-lined cut crystal decanter, the "Eurydice" model.
This model was featured in the 1904-1905 catalogue of the famous Belgian crystal manufacturer Val Saint Lambert.
With its high, conical shape and rich workmanship, this model is one of the most famous by this great company. 

Period: Early 20th century
Dimensions: Height: 41.5cm - Base diameter: 10cm
 
In 1826, two employees of the Vonêche crystal works set up their own crystal works in the Val Saint Lambert abbey. 
François Kemlin was a chemist and Auguste Lelièvre a polytechnician. The site on the banks of the Meuse was well chosen.  
The region was active in metallurgy and it would be easy to obtain the lead needed to make crystal.

Thanks to the financial support of Guillaume d'Orange and Baron Joseph de Bonaert, the Société anonyme des Verreries et Établissements du Val Saint-Lambert was created. 
It was bought out in 1836 by Société Générale de Belgique, and its products were soon exported all over the world. 
At the Brussels Exhibition of Belgian Industrial Products in 1841, Val Saint Lambert won a gold medal for its pure, refined and colourful crystal.

At the end of the 19th century, Val Saint Lambert presented crystal creations with geometric motifs for the first time. 
The success was phenomenal. 

The company built huge hangars and a hundred houses for the workers. It modernised with electric lighting, a gasworks and a railway line to the factory.
The factory was at its peak at the beginning of the 20th century. Crystal virtuosos such as Dieudonné Masson rubbed shoulders with the crème de la crème of designers, the Muller brothers from Nancy or Gallé and Daum, followed by Joseph Simon and Philippe Wolfers. 

Val Saint Lambert also worked with designers such as Yan Zoritchac, Frans Van Praet, Philippe Delvaux and Philippe Starck.

Val Saint Lambert's technical genius for crystal and the art of making everything it touches sublime enabled it to be invited into the highest spheres, from the tables of Belgian and European high society to the courts of the Russian tsars, the palaces of the maharajas, and the ocean liners of the Red Star Line or the Orient-Express. Pure elegance.