Émile Gallé
The poet of glass.
Émile Gallé of Nancy made glass with plants and insects in several cased layers. He was also a botanist.
Émile Gallé was born in 1846 in Nancy in eastern France. His father ran a business in faience and glass. Émile studied philosophy, botany and mineralogy and spent some time in Weimar in Germany. He learned glassmaking at a glassworks in Meisenthal in Lorraine. In 1877 he took over his father's business.
His breakthrough came at the Paris Expositions Universelles, especially that of 1889, where he showed glass, ceramics and furniture and attracted great attention. In 1900 he won the exhibition's highest award. He developed several new techniques, including glass with embedded pieces of coloured glass, known as glass marquetry, which he patented in 1898. He also made cased glass in several coloured layers that were etched or ground away to create reliefs.
Gallé's motifs come from nature: orchids, dragonflies, beetles, fungi and underwater plants. He was a knowledgeable botanist and studied plants closely. He often decorated his pieces with engraved lines of verse by poets such as Baudelaire and Victor Hugo, so-called speaking glass. He also designed furniture with marquetry in different woods. The bed Dawn and Dusk of 1904 is in the Musée de l'École de Nancy, which has the largest collection of his work.
Gallé was engaged in public affairs. During the Dreyfus affair he took the side of the wrongly convicted officer Alfred Dreyfus, which cost him customers. In 1901 he founded the École de Nancy, an alliance of the city's artists and industries, and became its first president. The movement made Nancy one of the most important centres of Art Nouveau.
Gallé died of leukaemia in 1904, only 58 years old. The firm went on making glass in his style until 1931, and pieces from the years immediately after his death were marked with a star after the name. Today he is regarded as the foremost glass artist of Art Nouveau and as one of those who made glass into art.