René Lalique
The jeweller who became a glass designer.
René Lalique made Art Nouveau jewellery in gold, enamel and glass and went on to become the foremost glass designer of Art Deco.
René Lalique was born in 1860 in Aÿ in Champagne and grew up in Paris. At sixteen he was apprenticed to the jeweller Louis Aucoc while studying at the school of decorative arts. He then spent two years in London. Back in Paris he worked as a freelance designer for major jewellery houses such as Cartier and Boucheron, and in the mid-1880s he set up his own workshop.
In the 1890s he transformed the art of jewellery. Instead of placing costly gemstones at the centre, he combined gold with enamel, horn, ivory, pearls and glass, and drew his motifs from nature: dragonflies, flowers, snakes and winged women. The actress Sarah Bernhardt was a client. He had a great breakthrough at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. The oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian bought around 145 of his works, which are now in the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, among them the famous Dragonfly Woman corsage ornament.
After 1900 he turned increasingly to glass. He began designing perfume bottles for the perfumer François Coty, and soon opened glassworks of his own, first near Paris and from 1921 at Wingen-sur-Moder in Alsace. With pressed and mould-blown glass he could mass-produce high-quality vases, bowls, lamps and bottles. His glass is often frosted or opalescent, with reliefs of women, birds, fish and plants.
Lalique became the foremost glass designer of Art Deco. At the 1925 Paris exhibition he showed, among other things, a large glass fountain. He made car mascots, glass panels for the Orient Express and decoration for luxury liners and churches. His glass combines industrial technique with the finesse of craftsmanship.
Lalique died in 1945. His firm still exists. A museum devoted to him opened in Wingen-sur-Moder in 2011. Today he is seen as one of the few artists who were leaders in both Art Nouveau and Art Deco.