Emile Gallé

Emile Gallé (1846-1904), French glassmaker and founder of the School of Nancy, a group of decorative artists in Nancy, Lorraine (now in France), who were to have considerable influence in propagating the art nouveau style in France. Born in Nancy, son of French glass and ceramics retailer Charles Gallé, he began designing glass and pottery decoration for his father at an early age, later studying a wide range of subjects, including art history, literature, design, botany, and mineralogy in Weimar, Germany, and glassmaking in Meisenthal, Lorraine (now in France). From the 1870s onwards he produced glass and, to a lesser extent, furniture and pottery, for which he gained recognition at major exhibitions in Paris. By this time he had his own factory and his output was prodigious. In 1901 he formed the Alliance Provinciale des Artistes, known as the École de Nancy (School of Nancy), with support from French designers Victor Prouvé and Louis Majorelle. Prouvé was to run his factory after his death.

Influenced early in his career by both Islamic and Venetian glass, and later by the art of the French symbolists (see Symbolist Movement), Gallé mastered every imaginable technique for making and decorating glass, cleverly exploiting imperfections such as air bubbles, clouding, and crazing, an all-over patterning of minute cracks. He was especially successful in cased glass, a technique used to layer two or more colors which he then cut to form subtle designs of leaves, vines, or other naturalistic subjects. Inspired both by Japanese prints that had become popular at the time, and by his life-long passion for botany, these sinuous, naturalistic subjects placed him at the forefront of the art nouveau design movement.