A Bay of Rio de Janeiro vase by Établissements Gallé (Millon)
A Bay of Rio de Janeiro vase by Établissements Gallé (Millon)
Gallé market watch : December 2020
As usual, there is a glut of offerings at this time of the year, with dozens of auctions and hundreds of Gallé glass items on sale. The L’Europe de l’Art nouveau sale, by Millon, on the 1st December, has quite a few remarkable items in the art glass category, among which is a “Baie de Rio” vase (lot 192), estimated 2500 to 3000 euros.
This vase is a variant of a famous industrial series titled “Rio de Janeiro” (from the inscription on the vases themselves) picturing the emblematic sugarloaf mountain. This feature is absent here but there is no doubt that this landscape belongs to the same series which offered about half a dozen different views. Another copy of this specific design was sold by Christie’s in 2008 (2008-10-29, #191, £ 3,500). Compared to other variations, it’s a rather simple version of the landscape : the back face of the vase offers only a mountain range view and some low trees, with few details. It’s also unusual for its colours, brown and rose on yellow-white background, while the main combinations are dark and light blue on yellow-white, and brown and orange on yellow-white.
This series will deserve its own article in due course, but suffice it to say for now that it’s one of the few identified exotic and even foreign landscapes in the Gallé cameo vases production, which makes it highly important. Gallé landscapes designs fall in three general categories : river/lake views from Lorraine, mountain views from the Vosges or the Alps, sea or maritime views usually from Brittany. The other famous exception to this classification is of course the Lake of Como series. There must exist therefore a particular story behind this Rio de Janeiro design, still largely unknown. René Dézavelle, in his souvenirs, states that the series was designed specifically “for an exhibition” “in the USA”, where the Établissements Gallé direction hoped to expand its sales [1]. But Dézavelle’s reliability is sometimes sketchy [2]. While it is certainly plausible that this landscape signals an interest for the American market, this does not explain why no other design more emblematic of the USA was produced, unless one simply switches “South America” for “USA” in this testimony [3]. Moreover, one crucial piece of information is missing, which could help to uncover this story : the exact date of the series’ creation. Dates offered by the experts on the known copies vary wildly, as it is often the case, from the early 1900s to the 1930s.
A design earlier than late 1918 ?
Quite a few experts from some of the biggest auctions houses have dated this series from 1906-1914, or even earlier, mainly by comparison, it seems, with other landscapes series which did appear in this period. This datation has sometimes been backed up by personal testimonies from collectors. Interestingly though, the author of the Millon catalogue not only refuses to follow this precedent, but he/she does not provide a date at all for the vase, nor for any other Gallé in his/her auction for that matter [4].
A datation earlier than 1918 does not hold for several reasons, in my view.
Firstly, there is the matter of the signature on the vase, which belongs to the well known Gallé-underlined-with-a-tangent-G type : this is one of the ubiquitous Gallé signatures for the 1920s [5] . It’s a well known principle that “a vase can’t be judged by its signature” [6] and it’s certainly true to some extent [7]. But in the case of the Établissements Gallé – by contrast with Émile Gallé’s time – there was a deliberate effort made to use the signature as a trademark, as I will show in greater details in a future article [8]. It resulted in both the choice of a distinctive, easily reproductible design (limiting therefore the difference from one worker’s hand to the other), and the periodical change of this design. The exact sequence of these changes is not yet entirely known, but the picture has become slowly clearer in recent years : one can now state with confidence that this particular signature was not yet in use in 1918, and probably introduced only somewhere in the early to mid-1920s. Moreover, all the known examples of this vase have signatures ascribed to the 1920s and none of them the 1908-1918 exclusive Gallé-underlined-with-an-intersected-G type.
Secondly, the Établissements Gallé experienced all kind of difficulties during the First World War, which severely limited their production capacity. There were some new designs introduced during this period but the workers mainly recycled old ones as their work were limited to finish blanks from the 1914 stock [9]. The colour ranges used for the Rio de Janeiro vases match in large part – except for this one from Millon – with the Lake of Como’s ones. We know that the drawing of this latter design dates from July 1914 at the earliest and that the first matching vases were almost certainly not made before 1919 [10] . The comparison with the Lake of Como’s series suggests that they shared the same author, Auguste Herbst, and therefore a close if not identical chronology.
Another lesson regarding the role of memory in the history of glass
It might appear harsh to reject completely the testimony of collectors regarding the chronology of their own acquisitions as a valuable source for establishing the datation of a particular series.
But there is ample precedent for this phenomenon : one of the main sources for the Établissements Gallé history has long been the memoirs of René Dézavelle, already referenced above. He was a painter-decorator who entered the factory in 1919. He waited until 1974 to jot down his souvenirs – they were published in the Glasfax Newsletter [1]. While this publication holds plenty of first hand valuable information on the Gallé factory, it is also riddled with mistakes from a faulty memory [2]. How could it be otherwise when more than four decades had passed since his lay-off with the closing of the factory ?
Evidently, when it comes to the precise datation of a vase, this kind of testimony which relies heavily on distant memories, even when it is written, is no substitute for a proper document like an invoice. And here lies the wider lesson from this quite modest object for the history of art glass in general and Gallé history in particular : like any other object of history, it must be subjected to the sources’ critical analysis. This reads like a trite statement for any historian, but unfortunately there is no lack of publications about Gallé, nor about other famous glass factories with a similar sketchy archival record, to prove it is a necessary reminder.
[26.11.2020 : Amended at the auctioneer’s request]
[02.12.2020 : sold for 7500 € before fees]
© Samuel Provost, 25 November 2020
Notes
[1] Dézavelle R. 1974, L’histoire des vases Gallé (The history of the Gallé vases), The Glasfax Newsletter, Montréal, esp. p. 68.
[2] Some of his errors had a remarkably influential posterity, like his 1904-1906 chronology for the Gallé-with-star signature : see Provost S. 2017, “La signature Gallé à l’étoile : une révision chronologique et une estimation quantitative”, Journal of Glass Studies, 39, p. 349‑365 [Open Access version available here], esp. p. 457.
[3] There are, however, some very rare Gallé landscapes vases with tall buildings emerging above some trees which have been described as “skyscrapers” and might represent an American city : Ader Picard Tajan auction’s catalogue, 22 March 1974, lot 25, with a b&w picture. The picture’s quality does not allow a conclusive judgment. This design is notably absent from the 1927 catalogue in the Rakow Library.
[4] For many Gallé industrial series, this is actually the sensible safe option nowadays, as it is far preferable compared to narrow date ranges somewhat haphazardly sticked by some on these series.
[5] On the chronology of Gallé’s signature, see the seminal study by François Le Tacon : Le Tacon F. 1993, “Les techniques et les marques sur verre des Établissements Gallé après 1918”, Le Pays Lorrain, 74, 4, p. 203‑218 [available online]. For a more recent and more or less up-to-date catalogue of signatures, see Olland Ph. 2016, Dictionnaire des maîtres verriers : marques et signatures : de l’Art nouveau à l’Art déco, Dijon, Éditions Faton.
[6] See for instance Esveld T. 2010, Glass made transparent: a practical guide to French art glass by Gallé, Daum and Schneider, Rijkevorsel, Belgique, Gallery Tiny Esveld, p. 38-49. The quote is taken from the chapter’s subtitle. But in her own remarks on the Gallé signature, she acknowledges the existence of a rather clear chronology of the main types used after 1904.
[7] Of course, a signature can be forged, to give some credibility to a fake glass. On genuine items, there were also mistakes made in using inadvertently a previous type of signature, older than the « active » signature for one particular series - some kind of “legacy signature” if you will.
[8] I have made some preliminary remarks and introduced a limited correction of the traditional chronology in the following article : Provost 2017, op. cit. note 2 above. I plan to translate it for this website in the coming months.
[9] On the Gallé factory during the First World War, see : Provost S. 2018, “Une cristallerie d’art sous la menace du feu : les Établissements Gallé de 1914 à 1919”, dans Thomas C. et Palaude S. (dir.), Composer avec l’ennemi en 14-18. La poursuite de l’activité industrielle en zones de guerre. Actes du colloque européen, Charleroi, 26-27 octobre 2017, Bruxelles, Académie royale de Belgique, p. 105‑118 [Open Access version available here].
[10] Not only the factory was largely in disarray at the time but the artist responsible for this design, Auguste Herbst, was held in a special prisoners camp in southern France because he was a German national. He would have been therefore unable to assist the execution of his project, which in effect rules it out before his return in Nancy in 1919.
How to cite this article : Samuel Provost, “A Bay of Rio de Janeiro vase by Établissements Gallé”, Newsletter on Art Nouveau Craftwork & Industry, no 1, 25 November 2020 [link].