Daum # Nancy, Vase "After Edmond Lachenal", Art Nouveau Early 1900s

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. 

One of France’s most influential ceramists, Edmond Lachenal contributed significantly to the development of Art Nouveau. His poor beginnings in Paris led to an apprenticeship at age 12 with a local potter. In 1870, he began working in the studio of the leading ceramist, Theodore Deck.

Lachenal was a quick study and by 1873, he had demonstrated considerable talent to be appointed Director of Decoration in Deck’s studio as well as receiving an Honorable Mention at the World’s Fair in Vienna.

By 1881 Lachenal had opened his studio with his wife and fellow ceramist, Anne Le Cloarec, in Paris Auteuil neighborhood where there was a high concentration of ceramic production and artistic exchange. He subsequently moved his studio production outside of Paris; however, his impact on the artistic capital only increased with time. He won gold medals there in 1889 and 1900 at the Expositions Universelle.

By the early-1900s, large exhibitions of his work were held at the Österreichisches Museum fur Angewandte Kunst in Vienna and Munich and Louis Majerelle’s new Paris showrooms at the former site of Bing’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau. It was his breadth and range that set him apart from other contemporary artists working in the field. He worked in faience and stoneware, and he collaborated with sculptors to produce ceramic versions of their work. His oeuvre included applied experimental decorative ceramic styles as well as masterful sculpted organic models which reflected the evolving trend of Japonisme.

Lachenal’s creative solutions of utilizing hydrofluoric acid to remove the outer layer of glazes to create a velvety matte finish became his hallmark email mat veloute. As a harbinger and master of the Art Nouveau style, Lachenal’s ceramic work moved french ceramics from an appreciative replication of the natural world influenced by the arts from Japan to a fully actualized aesthetic in which artistic process and form expressed these higher laws found in nature. Lachenal leaves an incredible legacy.

Find Edmond Lachenal vases and other decorative objects on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by Galerie Fledermaus)