Art Nouveau Crystal Wine Glass by Émile Gallé

Wine or tapered water glass in wavy amber glass with ribbed heel, floral decoration released with two golds acid. Signed under the base “Cristallerie E. Gallé Nancy Model and decoration deposited” and the number 2 painted in gold. It is in very good condition, no cracks or scratches. Note however, at the bottom of the glass there is a black mark frozen in the glass.

Émile Gallé (1846-1904) was one of the most prominent 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 in Meisenthal, and in ceramics at the Faïencerie de Saint-Clément, Emile Gallé was associated with his father’s earthenware and glassware trading and decoration company from 1867. It was 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 in fact not afraid to learn about blowing. He added to this a good knowledge of cabinetmaking and especially the family passion for natural sciences and more particularly for plants which led 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 Earth and Glass Exhibition in 1884, Gallé was dedicated to the Paris Universal Exhibition. in 1889 with three awards for his ceramics, his glassworks and his furniture (including a Grand Prix for his glassworks), in which he notably celebrates the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and therefore develops, through his symbolic decorations, the theme of patriotism. On this occasion, Gallé was made an officer of the Legion of Honor. From that date, Gallé intensely developed his technical and aesthetic research on glasswork, a field in which he developed and created new manufacturing processes. His glassworks were designed in Meisenthal until 1894, when he opened a glassworks which was set on fire in May 1894 in his company in Nancy. Emile Gallé’s research led in 1898 to the filing of two patents, for “a kind of decoration and patina on crystal” and “a kind of marquetry of glasses and crystals” by depositing small inclusions of glass in the molten paste. His pieces are then reworked by engraving, on a wheel for the most precious, with hydrofluoric acid for the most common, his engravers-decorators thus releasing a cameo decoration on a doubled or multilayer glass. After Emile Gallé’s death in 1904, his glassworks continued to produce until 1936. Each piece bears Gallé’s signature with hundreds of variants.

HEIGHT 13.3 CM DRINKING DIAMETER 7 CM BASE DIAMETER 6 CM.