DAUM Pierre d'AVESN Large Floral Vase, 1920

Pierre d'Avesn, was born in 1901. In the beginning, at 14 years old, he worked at Rene Lalique's for 10 years. During this period, he designed Lalique's famous "Serpent" vase as well as the "Tourbillons" vase, two of the most highly priced and extremely collectable pieces by Lalique. In 1926, he left René Lalique and created his own models. His pieces were made by Cristallerie de Saint-Rémy. In 1930, Daum Freres asked him to take the artistic direction of their molded glass department in their glassworks in Croismare, which he did until the famous strikes in 1936. In 1937, he took the management of Verlys until World War I in 1940. From 1940, he worked on his own. His pieces were made by Cristallerie de Choisy-le-Roi (Sèvres), surely the most important French glass worker for the molded glass Art pieces with René Lalique and Sabino.

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.