René Lalique

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Enamel, glass, and topaz hair ornament and brooch by Lalique, 1900; in the Victoria and Albert … (credit: Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

(born April 6, 1860, Ay, Fr. — died May 5, 1945, Paris) French jeweler and glassmaker. Trained in Paris and London, he opened his own firm in Paris in 1885 and soon acquired clients such as Sarah Bernhardt. Reacting against machine-produced jewelry featuring precious gems, he designed elegant and fantastic jewelry with less conventional gemstones (tourmaline, cornelian, etc.) and materials such as horn. His designs contributed significantly to the Art Nouveau movement and later the Art Deco movement. His interest in architectural glass led him to develop the style of molded glass for which he is famous, characterized by iced surfaces, elaborate patterns in relief, and occasionally applied or inlaid colour.

For more information on René Jules Lalique, visit Britannica.com.

(b Ay, Marne, 6 April 1860; d Paris, 1945). French jeweller, glassmaker and designer. He began his studies at the Lyc?e Turgot near Vincennes and after his father's death (1876) he was apprenticed to the Parisian jeweller Louis Aucoq, where he learnt to mount precious stones. Unable to further his training in France, he went to London to study at Sydenham College, which specialized in the graphic arts. On his return to Paris in 1880, he found employment as a jewellery designer creating models for such firms as Cartier and Boucheron. His compositions began to acquire a reputation and in 1885 he took over the workshop of Jules d'Estape in the Rue du 4 Septembre, Paris. He rejected the current trend for diamonds in grand settings and instead used such gemstones as bloodstones, tourmalines, cornelians and chrysoberyls together with plique ? jour enamelling and inexpensive metals for his creations. His jewellery, which was in the Art Nouveau style, included hair-combs, collars, brooches, necklaces and buckles (e.g. water-nymph buckle, c. 1899-1901; Lisbon, Mus. Gulbenkian), and he also branched out into metalwork, producing gold boxes, inkwells and daggers. His favourite motifs included flowers and insects

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French glassware and jewelry designer René Lalique (1860 - 1945) is recognized as one of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries' finest creators of Art Deco and Art Nouveau decorative items. Lalique's glassware was both stylistically and technologically innovative, leading to great success for the designer both in personal and architectural glass products. Today, Lalique is particularly remembered for his decorative glass, such as vases and bowls; the Lalique Company continues to produce art glass and jewelry to this day.

Born April 6, 1860, in Ay, a small village in the Marne region of France, Lalique came from humble beginnings to become one of the world's most renowned glassmakers. When Lalique was still a toddler, his family relocated to his businessman father's hometown in suburban Paris. However, they often returned to Ay on summer holidays, allowing Lalique to retain a close connection to his birthplace. From an early age, Lalique demonstrated a marked interest and ability in art. In 1872, Lalique enrolled in the Turgot collège, where he studied drawing under Jean-Marie Lequien. Lalique proved his early aptitude for art by winning a first prize in drawing while at the collège. He then continued his art studies at the Paris School for the Decorative Arts while also studying jewelry making.

In 1876, Lalique's father died and Lalique took regular employment as a jewelry-making apprentice under Louis Aucoc, one of Paris's premier jewelers, while attending evening courses at the Paris School for the Decorative Arts. This apprenticeship provided Lalique with an unparalleled opportunity to learn essential crafting skills hands-on, as well as offering an introduction to the kinds of raw materials used in jewelry design. After two years with Aucoc, Lalique moved to London, where he studied at Sydenham College, initially built as an art school in the famed Crystal Palace, a huge iron-and-glass building designed to house the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851. Although Lalique's reasons for going to England at this time are not obvious, Nicholas M. Dawes speculates in his book Lalique Glass that Lalique may have been "drawn to England by the blossoming arts and crafts movement, whose ideals and concepts were refreshingly distinct from those of fashionable Paris society and clearly more sympathetic to his own." Indeed, during the period of Lalique's studies in England, the first stirrings of his individual, naturalistic style became apparent.

First Professional Successes

Returning to Paris in 1880, Lalique worked both as a jewelry designer for a relative, M. Vuilleret, and, over the next few years, as an independent contract artist. He also studied sculpture and modeling under Lequien at the Ecole Bernard Palissy, completing his formal art training. Quickly, Lalique built up his contract clientele, designing jewelry for such major houses as Cartier and Boucheron. By 1885, Lalique was ready to strike out on his own, opening a small atelier which commenced work the following year. Here, he could produce his own unique style of jewelry stemming from the Art Nouveau style, still in its formative stages. Lalique particularly became known for his use of semiprecious gems, enamels, ivory, and other hard stones.

Lalique's success grew quickly and by 1887, he needed more space. He rented another atelier and ran both workshops until 1890, when he combined operations in one, larger location, with room for thirty workers. Working with two father-and-son sculptors, Lalique designed the decorations for the atelier's walls and ceilings; he would later marry Augustine Alice Ledru, the daughter and sister of these two sculptors. During his tenure in this workshop, Lalique truly came into his own as a designer. He made pieces for such luminaries as actress Sarah Bernhardt; Tony L. Mortimer noted in Lalique that Bernhardt's patronage "proved a valuable commercial asset which immediately gained him an international reputation." Lalique also began his first forays into glass work, either incorporating bits of glass into his jewelry designs or making such small pieces of glassware as perfume vials. On a personal note, in 1892 Lalique's first child, daughter Suzanne, was born.

The 1890s continued to hold triumphs for Lalique. By 1894, Lalique's pieces were sold in Siegfried Bing's La Maison de l'Art Nouveau, the shop which would lend its name to the Art Nouveau movement. In 1897, he exhibited some ivory-and-horn combs at Paris' Salon and was dubbed the "inventor of modern jewelry" by Emile Gallé. That same year, Lalique participated in the International Exposition at Brussels, Belgium, where he was awarded the Grand Prize. To cap off the year, he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

In 1898, Lalique established a workshop devoted to glassware. Although Lalique's period of experimentation with items made completely of glass was short-lived, he continued to use the material in conjunction with other metals. Lalique began working with bronze, perhaps encouraged by his wife's family. By the turn of the century, Lalique had begun creating large panel and bas-relief glass pieces, often framed in bronze. Intrigued by recently developed processes allowing glass to be cast into any form using a hollow mold, Dawes noted that "Lalique recognized the commercial potential in the malleable properties of [this kind of] glass and developed his own glass body, termed demi-cristal, with the same properties."

In 1900, Lalique exhibited with great success at the World's Fair at Paris. After this, Lalique turned more and more to the creation of glassware, finding many of his nature-inspired designs to be copied by rival jewelry makers. Lalique also celebrated the birth of his second child, son Marc, in September 1900 and was promoted to Officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1902, the Lalique family moved to a large house which Lalique had specially built, designing the striking front doors himself with a pine branch and pinecone motif.

Shifted to Glassware

Continuing to exhibit in major art shows both in France and throughout Europe, Lalique opened a store in 1905 on Paris' famed Place Vendôme offering both jewelry and glass. The boutique's location near perfumer François Coty's shop led to a providential partnership around 1908, with Lalique initially designing labels and later glass bottles for Coty's perfumes. This was the first time perfumes were packaged in distinctive, rather than traditionally classical, bottles; Lalique's designs for Coty were so evocative of the fragrance that he went on to design bottles for many major perfumers of the era. Lalique did not have the production capabilities necessary for the large amount of bottles Coty required for his mass market perfumes, so the earliest bottles were designed by Lalique but produced by Legras and Company; in 1909, Lalique opened his own glassworks just outside of Paris, allowing him to use his preferred demicristal type of glass, better showing Lalique's distinctive style. However, the year also held sorrow for Lalique: his wife, Augustine Alice Lalique-Ledru, died.

In 1911, Lalique turned definitively away from jewelry and to glassware following his exposition at the first show of the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts devoted exclusively to works in glass. The following year, he designed architectural features including doors, windows, and interior fittings for an upscale French residence and for the Coty Building on New York City's Fifth Avenue. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Lalique's production output changed from purely decorative items to include practical ones: laboratory glass for hospitals and pharmacies. After the war, however, Lalique found such a high demand for his products that in 1921 he built a large glassworks, Verrerie d'Alsace René Lalique et Cie, at Wingen sur Moder, in the east of France. (This factory remains in use by the Lalique Company today.)

Internationally Esteemed

In 1925, Lalique exhibited a number of decorative glass pieces in the emerging Art Deco style at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. This style, less naturalistic than the Art Nouveau style, became highly popular after the 1925 Exposition and Lalique successfully blended his existing style into the new Art Deco technique. This decade saw Lalique's glassware become available throughout France and indeed the world, with stores in the United States, England and Argentina among other countries offering Lalique pieces to the public. Lalique became particularly well-known for his mass produced frosted glass vases, first produced in 1926. His glassworks primarily turned out these small, relatively inexpensive pieces, although occasionally Lalique designed large pieces, including interior fittings and decorations for luxury French ocean liners; church windows throughout France; and a dining car of the world-famous Venice Simplon Orient Express, a luxury train running across Europe.

Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lalique also made his mark as a designer of the car mascot. The forerunner of modern hood ornaments, the car mascot was a small decorative item, often mounted on a car's radiator cap - at that time conveniently fitted with a screw-top metal attachment - or bolted over the engine casing. Lalique first designed a mascot for French car manufacturer Citroën in 1925; over the next several years, he created twenty-seven different mascots for car companies including Bentley and Rolls-Royce. The mascots could also serve as paperweights and had typically Lalique nature-related designs, often stylized animals such as grasshoppers, peacocks, eagles, or frogs. After car companies began designing their own logos to serve as mascots, Lalique marketed the pieces' other function, selling them as paperweights or bookends.

Lalique continued this course into the 1930s, primarily making small glass pieces but occasionally venturing into large, commissioned works, most notably with the design of fountains installed on Paris's Champs-Elysées, American department stores fixtures, and a Tokyo palace. Still producing a small amount of jewelry, in 1931, Lalique designed the popular cabochon ring. In 1935, Lalique opened a shop on the Rue Royale, in Paris, where the company still operates their offices and flagship store.

World War II and Lalique's Legacy

Although Lalique's products remained immensely popular, the company suspended operations in 1939 when its factory in Wingen sur Moder was occupied by an invading German force. The area remained under German control and the glassworks remained closed until the end of the war in 1945. Unfortunately, René Lalique did not live to see his factory re-open after the war; he died on May 9, 1945, at the age of 85, after a productive and successful life in creative jewelry and glass design. However, the death of Lalique did not mean the end of his company. In late 1945, Lalique's son Marc re-opened the Wingen sur Moder factory, designing new pieces and using a new, brighter form of glass. Marc Lalique's daughter, Marie-Claude Lalique, came to work with her father in 1956 and became the head of the glassworks in 1977 upon her father's death. Today, the Lalique Company continues to produce highly respected decorative glass and jewelry, with outlets throughout the world; Lalique's original, turn-of-the-century pieces can be found in such internationally-known museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, New York, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, France, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England.

Books

Bayer, Patricia and Mark Waller, The Art of René Lalique, Quintet, 1988.

Dawes, Nicholas M., Lalique Glass, Crown Publishers, 1986.

McDonald, Jesse, Lalique, Brompton Books, 1995.

Mortimer, Tony L., Lalique, Chartwell Books, 1989.

Online

"René Lalique, 1860 - 1945," http://www.cristallalique.fr/v1/biographie_en.htm (December 29, 2005).

Lalique was a dominant and influential figure in the art of glassmaking in France, establishing an international reputation through such major showcases for his work as the Lalique Pavilion at the Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels 1925 where he also exhibited furniture at the Sèvres Pavilion. He also worked as a textile, goldsmith, and jewellery designer, doing much to revolutionize the latter through his use of colourful gemstones and other materials less expensive than traditional diamonds such as ivory and translucent enamels. After taking up an apprenticeship with the Parisian jeweller Louis Aucoc in 1876, whilst at the same time taking evening classes at the École des Arts Décoratifs, Lalique moved to London in 1878. He remained there for two years before returning to Paris to practise as a jeweller in his own right. During the 1880s he established a reputation for innovative jewellery design, exhibited in the Vever and Boucheron jewellery displays at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. The 1890s saw the further consolidation of his reputation, winning Second Prize in the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs 1893 competition for the design of a drinking vessel and also designing stage jewellery for the fashionable actress Sarah Bernhardt. His displays at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 attracted particularly favourable notice, as was also the case at a number of other international exhibitions such as the St Louis World's Fair in the USA in 1904. In the following year he opened his first retail outlet in central Paris. Amongst his more significant commissions in the years leading up to the First World War were those from the parfumier François Coty for the creation of perfume bottles in 1908 and the design of Coty's Fifth Avenue boutique in New York in 1911. He also established Cristal Lalique in 1909. After the First World War he worked on the interior design of a number of prestigious ocean liners including that of the Paris (1921) and the Normandie (1935), as well the interiors of luxury coaches for the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits. The Lalique Pavilion at the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels of 1925 and its large fountain attracted particular notice, as did his interior designs for the Sèvres Pavilion. Lalique continued to receive prestigious commissions in later years including the main doors of the salon of Prince Asaka Yasuhiko's Palace in Tokyo in 1932.

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Illuminated automobile hood ornament in the form of a rooster by René Jules Lalique

René Jules Lalique was born in Ay, a small village in the Marne region of France on April 6, 1860, and died May 5, 1945. He was a glass designer, renowned for his stunning creations of perfume bottles, vases, jewellery, chandeliers, clocks and in the latter part of his life, automobile hood ornaments. The firm he founded is still active today.

Contents 1 Life and education 2 Art Nouveau jewellery designer 3 Glass maker 4 References 5 Bibliography 6 External links

Life and education

René luke Jules Lalique's early life was spent learning the methods of design and art he would use in his later life. At the age of two his family moved to a suburb of Paris due to his father's work, but traveled to Ay for summer holidays. These trips to Ay influenced Lalique's later naturalistic glasswork. In 1872, when he was twelve, he entered the College Turgot where he started drawing and sketching. With the death of his father two years later, Lalique began working as an apprentice to the goldsmith Louis Aucoc in Paris, and attended evening classes at the Ecole des arts décoratifs. He worked there for two years and then in 1876 moved to London to attend the Sydenham Art College for two years.

Art Nouveau jewellery designer

Meduse by René Lalique

Gold and enamel pectoral by René Lalique, Museu Gulbenkian, Lisbon

At the Sydenham Art College, his skills for graphic design were improved, and his naturalistic approach to art was further developed. When he returned from England, he worked as a freelance artist, designing pieces of jewellery for French jewelers, Cartier, Boucheron and others. In 1885 he opened his own business and designed and made his own jewelry and other glass pieces. By 1890, Lalique was recognized as one of France's foremost Art Nouveau jewellery designers; creating innovative pieces for Samuel Bing's new Paris shop, Maison de l'Art Nouveau. He went on to be one of the most famous in his field, his name synonymous with creativity, beauty and quality.

Glass maker

Dragonfly by René Lalique

In the 1920s he also became famous for his work in the Art Deco style. He was also responsible for the walls of lighted glass and elegant glass columns which filled the dining room and "grand salon" of the SS Normandie and the interior fittings, cross, screens, reredos, font of St. Matthew's Churches at Millbrook in Jersey ^[1] (Lalique's Glass Church). His earlier experiences in Ay were his defining influence later his work. As a result, many of his jewelry pieces and vases showcase plants, flowers and flowing lines.

On May 5, 1945 René Lalique was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France. His granddaughter, Marie Claude-Lalique (b. 1936), was also a glass maker. She died on April 14, 2003 in Fort Myers, Florida.

Recognized as one of the world's greatest glass makers and jewelry designers of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods, René Jules Lalique was an imaginative and creative artist, designer, and industrialist in all his work. It was said of him 'his work frankly bears the mark of our complicated civilisation, a thirst for elegance, novelty, comfort and luxury ^[2].

References

1. ^ "Lalique's Glass Church" Jane Ashelford The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society IV (1980)
2. ^ Mourey,Gabriel:Laliques Glassware Commercial Art July 1926

Bibliography

• William Warmus;The Essential Rene Lalique .Harry N Abrams Inc New York, 2002 ISBN 978-0810958364
• Bayer,Patricia & Waller,Mark: The Art of Rene Lalique ,Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd, London 1988 ISBN 0-7475-0182-3
• Dawes,Nicholas M: Lalique Glass,Crown Publishers ,London 1986 ISBN 978-0517558355

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: René Lalique

• Rene Lalique Biography at RLalique.com.
• Lalique company, with a biography of the artist from the company web site.
• Lalique jewels in the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian
• "René Lalique -'Oranges' vase". Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1157_art_deco/about/starobjects/vase.htm. Retrieved 2007-11-15. 
• This is Jersey article on St Matthew's Millbrook, the "Glass Church".
• René Lalique at Find a Grave

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