Find many varieties of an authentic piece of daum nancy art glass available at 1stDibs. Frequently made of
glass,
art glass and
metal, every item from our selection of daum nancy art glass was constructed with great care. Whether you’re looking for newer or older items, there are earlier versions available from the 19th Century and newer variations made as recently as the 20th Century. A choice in our collection of daum nancy art glass, designed in the
Art Nouveau,
Art Deco or
Mid-Century Modern style, is generally a popular piece of furniture. A well-made object in our assortment of daum nancy art glass has long been a part of the offerings for many furniture designers and manufacturers, but those produced by
Daum,
Louis Majorelle and
Edgar Brandt are consistently popular.
A piece of daum nancy art glass can differ in price owing to various characteristics — the average selling price 1stDibs is $5,275, while the lowest priced sells for $300 and the highest can go for as much as $95,000.
For collectors, Daum is a name in the first rank of the French makers of art glass, along with those of Émile Gallé and René Lalique. Led in its early decades by the brothers Auguste (1853–1909) and Antonin Daum (1864–1931), the company, based in the city of Nancy, established its reputation in the Art Nouveau period, and later successfully adopted the Art Deco style.
In 1878, lawyer Jean Daum took over the ownership of a glassworks as payment for a debt and installed his sons as proprietors. Initially, Daum made glass for everyday purposes such as windows, watches and tableware, but the success that Gallé enjoyed at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris — the international showcase for which the Eiffel Tower was built — inspired the Daum brothers to begin making art-glass pieces. They produced popular works of cameo glass, a decorative technique in which an outer layer of glass is acid-etched or carved off to reveal the layer below, but Daum became best known for vessels and sculptures in pâte de verre — a painstaking method in which finely ground colored glass is mixed with a binder, placed in a mold and then fired in a kiln.
Though early Daum glass was never signed by individual artists, the firm employed some of the masters of the naturalistic, asymmetrical Art Nouveau style, including Jacques Grüber, Henri Bergé and Amalric Walter (whose first name is frequently misspelled). Daum also collaborated with furniture and metalware designer Louis Majorelle, who created wrought-iron and brass mounts for vases and table lamps. In the 1960s, Daum commissioned fine artists, most notably Salvador Dalí and sculptor César Baldaccini, to design glass pieces. As you see from the works offered on 1stDibs, Daum has been home to an astonishingly rich roster of creative spirits and is today a state-owned enterprise making pâte de verre figurines.