Fake and Real Gallé Penguins vases.
Polar animals themed Gallé vases as a testimony on contemporary events.
Last June, a Penguins vase made a brief showing in an auction sale’s catalogue in Europe before being pulled out when it became apparent that it was very probably a fake one1. This aborted sale seems as good an opportunity as any to give some scrutiny to this series that has been the subject of some long-drawn discussion on the French Art Glass group on Facebook. Unlike most of the previous articles on this newsletter, I cannot claim here to have found some relevant internal archives from Établissements Gallé, so this paper does look mainly speculative. There is nonetheless good circumstantial evidence from external sources to date this series from the first half of 1931, which explains its scarcity and the many attempts to make forgeries.
Among the animal themed late Gallé cameo series, the Penguins vases remain a small enigma. These are among the most recognisable and at the same time among the rarest of all industrial glass series from the Etablissements Gallé, to the point that their authenticity might have been challenged. For this reason, the design was copied multiple times, as it is usually the case, with forgeries ranging in quality from horrible to passable or even good. They fit in rather nicely in the overall evolution of the Gallé line with the introduction in the second half of the 1920s of several designs centred on large birds or mammals, which were hitherto absent from the repertoire. The problem here is that, contrary to other heavily copied series, there is no available original pictures documenting the design, nor is there, to the best of my knowledge, any specimen in a museum collection or with an ownership’s history including official Gallé invoices or other documents. So, the Penguins vases stand in contrast with almost all the other large animals' series — the Cockerel (introduced in 1915/1918), the Storks (1918), the Eagles (1915/1919-1923), the Elephants (1925), the Seagull (1927), the Polar Bears (ca. 1927-1929) —, for which there subsists at least one piece of evidence regarding their creation, like a drawing, a photograph, a mention in the Gallé archives or in contemporary newspapers, etc. It’s true that it’s not alone either, in this category of undocumented animal designs, but the other ones are more obscure or less desirable, and they were thus less copied, if at all. The Vulture or the Parakeet vases spring to mind here. There are also types of designs far more famous with almost no hard historical data on their origin, like the Rio de Janeiro series.
A limited corpus of vases.
The number of available vases for this study is quite restricted2. Excluding the poorest of the forgeries, as well as some better ones I was prevented to use for legal reasons, I have selected the following specimens, numbered P1 to P5, whose authenticity can be discussed – some of them for comparison purpose only, since there is no doubt they are fakes. All of them have the same general shape (20.3 to 20.6 cm high), which can be described as a kind of bottle or carafe (it will be discussed below), but there are slight variations, which may well provide some clues regarding their authenticity. One group of three vases clearly comes from the same mould and have an identical design, down almost to the smallest detail:
P1 was sold by the Vienna imKinsky auction house in 2018. It bears a Mk VI signature. On the main face, a group of four black and white penguins stand on a patch of icy rock, the two on the right facing each other in a so-called salute scene. The penguins are well-defined, seen in profile or from three quarters. Their palmed feet are clearly delineated. Only one, the tallest, the second from the right, has its beak slightly open. On the background, left and right, five successive snowy mounds or icebergs on the sea are visible while the skyline is marked by a simple gently sloped mountain. On the back, there are only three, slightly larger, penguins, looking upward and ignoring each other, on a simpler background with two somewhat steeper ice mountains or icebergs. The vase has only two cameo layers (dark blue on white, with a bluish (?) transparent base layer). The way the dark blue topmost layer is degraded on the ground below the penguins seems to indicate it’s opaque and not translucent.
P2 is the oldest recorded piece of the selection: it was sold by Christie’s in 1998. The only picture available comes from the back face and looks to be identical to the imKinsky’s one – provided for the difference in lighting/exposure. There is of course a chance that it was indeed the same vase.
P3 appeared in a Jaremos auction at Carrolton (TX, USA) in 2018: it’s obviously a cut down specimen of the same series, with the same pattern. The vase was cut off at its shoulders, 2 or 3 cm above the skyline, presumably after the neck was damaged. A welcome side picture shows that, as expected, the vase has a somewhat flattened body, and provided additional details on the decor, revealing that the right slope on the back face is that of a sharp pronged ice cliff of an iceberg. The signature is the same Mk VI as on P1. The colours look a bit different, with a yellowish tinge to the white snowy mountains, but that may well represent an artefact of the photograph rather than a genuine chromatic difference.
A motley group of three other vases with a very close shape and pattern are available on various online sites:
P4 was sold for a record price of $46,6893 in 2016 at James D. Julia’s auctions4. At first glance, the vase appears to be very closely related to the P1-P3 group, but there are significant differences, beyond the most obvious one, the purple colour of the top cameo layer. The shape, with the neck and rim, does not look the same; the only scene pictured, i.e. the front, has the same “penguins’ salute”, but the details seem a bit sketchier — there’s a blurry aspect missing from the previous ones; the icebergs and the skyline in the background are also different. The signature belongs to the Mk VI type, as on P1 and P3, but its execution is mediocre at best, even suspect: the way the G’s leg and the underlining stroke are joined, the drawing of the G’s head, as well as the second L’s link to the έ suggest a drawing hand unfamiliar with this classic signature’s design. This does not look like a genuine Mk VI signature. The combination of these differences cast some doubt on the authenticity of this vase, that looks like an attempt to copy the P1-P3 design rather than a legit variation on this design by the Établissements Gallé.
Finally, P5 is the vase that started this investigation of the series. It’s an obvious fake with an approximate shape, the look of a flat mechanical etching, an absolute lack of details and nuances, and a spurious Mk II signature to boot. But it’s still a passable copy compared to other even more atrocious attempts.
What to make of these differences? As always, a major forewarning is necessary: it’s tricky to judge a vase from photographs only, since various distortions both in geometry and colours can affect the perception, not to mention the limited number of views available to pass judgement. That said, the differences between P1-P3 on one hand, and the other specimens (among which P4-P5), on the other hand, look at the same time to be too important to be dismissed as mere variations resulting from the industrial process, and not significant enough to mark a deliberate variant of the design, especially since the vase shape is supposed to remain the same.
The Penguin series shape.
Contrary to most of the floral and even the landscape designs, the big animal series from the 1920s were available on very few different shapes: as far as I can determine, the Elephants were restricted to only one; the Polar Bears appeared on two types, one closed vase, one open shape; the Seagull on three glass shapes, a vase, a charger, and a lamp. The same remark looks true for the elusive Penguin series. If we discard the most obvious fakes, all the candidates, so to speak, have the same shape, a bottle or a handle-less carafe like vase with a narrow neck and an everted mouth-rim, as well as a simple base without a foot-rim. The exceptions appear to be either cut down specimens of these bottle-shaped vases, missing their upper part, or dubious copies.
This shape is attested in the Gallé line from the 1920s. It’s featured on plate 35 of the Gallé photographical album that served as a sales catalogue, now in the Rakow Library of the Corning Museum of Glass. This descending grapevine decorated vase bears the reference number 129 on the plate and its height is given as 20 cm, which is indeed roughly the size of our Penguin series. Many late Gallé series were still made in pre-WW1 shapes, using the same cast-iron moulds. For this reason, this 1927 album does not constitute proof that this particular carafe shape was created around that period. But, it remains a rather rare form and I could not locate any sure pre-WW1 specimen for it, be it on the market today or in the pictorial archives. A 1920s’ introduction therefore cannot be ruled out.
What distinguishes this shape from other similar vases is its somewhat stocky lower body. I would argue that the choice of this unusual shape, among the hundreds of available moulds in the Gallé factory, owed much to this profile and its general resemblance with the overall silhouette of a penguin. And this in turn perhaps could justify the possible limitation of the penguin decor pattern to one shape only, although this is highly speculative. But it’s notable that the penguins themed glass vases from the other major glasshouses from Nancy (Daum, Muller Frères) also had a comparable form (see below) for the most common variant of their respective design for this theme.
An alternate Penguins shape attributed to Ets Gallé.
In this regard, the auction house Hôtel des Ventes Blandan in Nancy (now Anticthermal) sold a potentially critical vase on the 15th October 1989, described as “vase non signé à décor de manchots sur la banquise” (a description later modified on their website as a “vase Gallé décor de pingouins (non signé et non terminé)”5. There is very little known about this vase, whose picture was published in the November-December 1989 auction catalogue, because of the remarkable price it had fetched. It’s a three layers cameo glass, ovoid shaped vase, 47 cm high, for it was mistaken by its previous owner as an umbrella stand (!). The shape is probably the same as the River/Lake landscape numbered 230 on plate 23 of the Rakow Library Gallé album, which is also 47 cm tall. If this was one of the original shapes of this Penguin series, then this specimen is the only known one, as far as I could determine. Another hypothesis would be that it was a blank intended for a flower design, but that seems rather far-fetched because of the unusual colour combination (brown-orange, blue, white) that does not relate to other known decors. The fact that the vase is described as unsigned and unfinished is of course most significant. Its attribution to the Établissements Gallé looks justified on the ground of the striking resemblance of its decor pattern (as far as we can judge) with the Penguin series, but other hypothesises also come under consideration.
The lack of a signature is disturbing and may have played an important part in the characterisation of the vase as unfinished. It’s of course possible that the expert missed it, as it sometimes happens: some signatures are barely legible, either because of a quality control issue or because of some later damage. However, that possibility looks very remote given the size of the vase and the experience of the Nancy auction house. As a rule, unsigned official Gallé pieces were never put to sale, since the mark was such an important part of the company’s identity and appeal. But it could happen that some pieces had their signature accidentally erased at some stage during the etching process. In that case, one remedy was to add it on the piece. The cheapest option was to do it in intaglio rather than to modify part of the decor to accommodate a new cameo signature. So, if this vase is authentic, it stands to reason that it did not reach that final stage, because of some other issue that we’re unaware of.
Two other options could explain the absence of a signature on the vase. First, it could be an unfinished or even unworked blank, part of the stock of leftovers that was sold at an auction sale in August 1936, during the last act of the factory’s closure6. Ex-Gallé workers or other glassworkers from the Nancy area, well learned in cameo glass etching, could have then attempted to finish it. Second, it could be of course a forgery or rather a copy, a kind of hommage, since the missing signature seems to exclude an outright attempt at fooling a prospective buyer that it is indeed a genuine Gallé. These competing two options have in common a late date of production for this vase. Whatever the case, barring the emergence of other similar specimens, there is not much more that can be said than that this peculiar vase confirms the working hypothesis: this series is an extremely scarce and late one in the Gallé line of products.
Other highly questionable Penguins shapes.
Other shapes of Gallé signed glass do exist with patterns of Penguins, but none of them inspire much confidence in their authenticity. One particular vase, though, deserves some scrutiny because of its above-average quality, when it comes to the acid etching7. It was originally sold as a copy, but there was some doubt about it. Its front face general design is indeed close to the P1-P3 group highlighted above, with an additional small penguin on the left, while the back has four penguins in a different posture. The icebergs and the skyline also differ, but resemble somewhat this P1-P3 design. These differences perhaps would not be enough to disqualify right away the vase, but other characteristics are more forbidding. The general shape looks a bit similar to a late Gallé one, mostly used with a relief water-lily decor, but it’s not quite the same, and it’s therefore casting a major doubt on the authenticity of the vase. The signature too is a deep concern: the Mk III type used here normally ends in 1920, although there are some instances of its return on some very limited series later. But on this vase, this Mk III signature type is preceded by the letter “a” for which there is simply no justification. This “a” prefix is located where the star used to be on the Mk II type, to distinguish the posthumous production of Établissements Gallé from Émile Gallé’s series, but it’s unheard off. The simplest explanation is that it is indeed meant to differentiate this vase from a genuine Gallé, in the way Romanian glassblowers added the TIP mark on their copies (of a much lesser quality than this, by the way). If you read the signature in plain French, you get “a Gallé”, that is literally “to Gallé” as a kind of hommage or dedication!8
The bottom line is that there is no credible candidate for an alternate shape to the P1-P3 for a genuine Penguin series. There could still be a doubt about the authenticity of this P1-P3 group, since there is no documentary evidence to match them to. But, so far, they represent the best candidates for the elusive Gallé Penguin series.
A Design on wood as well as glass.
The best evidence for the authenticity of the Penguins design probably lies in the existence of a matching wood marquetry from the same period. The 1920s routinely saw the Établissements Gallé make use of the same themes, with very close designs if not outright copies, on glass and wood series. This was not an innovation by itself of course, for many pattern or decorative themes had been shared in Émile Gallé’s time already between his glass and wood artworks. After all, the very idea of a shared decor across multiple mediums and objects was prominent among the Art Nouveau principles. But this was done with more subtlety and variation than what happened in the 1920s, when it became a simple transposition. Moreover, this sharing or reuse of themes became systematic for the main series in general, and for the animal themes in particular.
One of the reasons for this increase is easy to surmise: while the glassmaking and the cabinetmaking departments of the Gallé factory had each their designers before 1918, the ascent of Auguste Herbst as the artistic director in late 1919 terminated this distinction. As the main designer of furniture for Gallé since his recruitment in 1898, he is the author of most pre-1919 known decor patterns on wood. He kept this role afterward, but he added the overall supervision of all designs until his dismissal in late 19319. His seniority among the Gallé artists also meant that he was the goto choice for all special projects.
Other draughtsmen were enlisted for designing the glass series, like Jean Rouppert in 1919, Georges Dethorey and Théodore Ehrhart after 1924. But it was Auguste Herbst who was trusted with the commemorative or prestige pieces, like the Seagull in 1927 and the Polar Bears, most likely in 1929. The former is known from multiple newspaper articles10, the second is still an hypothesis, but one that is strongly backed up by evidence: a Polar bear drawing by Herbst akin to the vase design comes from his family archives11 and a wooden tray bearing his signature presents a variant of the polar bears theme (see above)12. The tray dates almost certainly after 1931, when Herbst had to work as an independent artist and as a result tried his hand in multiple projects13. It’s not identical to the Gallé trays and side tables featuring this theme, but close enough to alley all reasonable doubt.
Like the Polar bears, all the big animals themed vases had thus their counterpart on small furniture, either tea trays, side tables or nesting tables: Elephants are common enough (it stands to reason since they would have been the oldest design among these) but Polar bears, Seagulls, Seals, and Penguins too are also attested. Up to now, only trays, rather than tables, have come up with this Penguins design. The drawing is not the same as on the vase because the pictural space is markedly different, and wider, to begin with. But there is an unmistakable similarity with the Penguins vase, and in general with the other polar animals themed vases and wood marquetries from the Établissements Gallé. By analogy with the previous models, it stands to reason that Auguste Herbst was the designer.
Beyond proving the authenticity of the designs, the Penguins wood marquetries also hint at the decor’s very late date of creation. There is, to start with, the Art Deco style of the trays themselves, whose build is very different from pre-1920 models: gone are the curved shapes and lines, in favour of straight parallel lines. These same characteristics are shared by the other animal themed trays and side tables.
Furthermore, nesting tables provide an interesting data point for the Gallé designs’ overall chronology: their sets mean that the matching designs were marketed together at the time and of course that the creation of each pattern could be contemporary or somewhat older. In this regard, one very rare series of nested tables could give a tantalising hint as to the relative chronology of the Penguins. Its three tables unite the different polar/sea animals already illustrated on glass and linked with different expeditions, the Bears, the Seals, and the Seagulls: it’s therefore a post-1927 creation, and probably, with the tentative chronology ascribed to the Bears, a post-1929 one. As it’s been already noted, the Seals are still rarer than the Penguins on cameo glass. But surely, given the apparent popularity of the subject, the Penguins had to be featured on this series, perhaps instead of the Seagulls, to get a full polar theme. That they were not is, in my view, a strong indication that they were a later creation than the three other designs, which fits well with a 1931 date — unless, of course, such a nesting table set featuring the Penguins emerges someday, to disprove this hypothesis.
A Popular Theme among the Art Glassmakers from Nancy and its area.
There is ample evidence that industrial art glassmakers from Nancy and its surrounding area were closely watching and copying each other’s new decors, whenever they saw the promise for some commercial success. They most probably were spurred too to do it by the pressure from their usual retailers to come up with something similar to the competition’s offerings. Many instances of copycat accusations are documented between the major glasshouses from Lorraine, Gallé, Daum, Delatte or Muller, during the 1920s and of course long before that in some cases14. There were even accusations of outright theft of drawing materials (tracing papers and pouncing patterns) from the Gallé factory in 190915. Some of these arguments even went to trial, but after both Gallé and Daum had failed, in different periods, to ascertain their copyright on some designs, it was more or less recognised that a frequent renewal of the themes and a better quality of execution were really the only ways to protect one’s brand.
In this context, it is wholly unsurprising to find Penguins models in the Daum and Muller lines of artistic glass. Their general design is close enough to Gallé’s: penguins are depicted standing on ice, alone or in small groups. These are smaller vases than the Gallé one, but the Muller one16 in particular is vaguely reminiscent of its shape. Daum, on the other hand, had at least three shapes, two small vases and a kind of low bowl17, with the same decor.
These Daum and Muller vases could be of a great help to date the Gallé ones. Alas, they are as scarce and poorly known. Muller’s are usually dated ca. 1930-193518, while Daum’s proposed dates of creations are somewhat earlier, ranging from ca. 1910 to ca. 192519. It looks safe to say that these dates are largely hypothetical, in lack of a proper documentary base, but that a consensus emerges to place these productions in the late 1920s or even the early 1930s. They are most likely close contemporaries of the Gallé Penguins.
Jean-Baptiste Charcot’s polar explorations and their echo in Nancy.
This chronological range of these Penguins vases follow broadly the French public interest in the Arctic and Antarctic seas as revealed by one of the most famous explorers of this era, Jean-Baptiste Charcot (1867-1936). From his first expedition in the Antarctic in 1905 with his ship Le Français, to his death in 1936 in the last sailing of his Pourquoi Pas? IV, Charcot held the French enthralled of his explorations.
During the 1920s, a new race to the Poles took place, with each world power eager to ascertain its rights on this last still largely terra incognita. In the Antarctic Ocean, France thus officially reaffirmed its claim on the Terre Adélie, in 1924. Jean Baptiste Charcot mounted several new explorations with the Pourquoi Pas? in the following years, but in the Arctic area this time. They were extensively covered by the French press, both at the national and regional level. Many articles in the Est Républicain, for instance, related his attempt to rescue the plane of the French pilot René Guilbaud and the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, lost at sea in June 1928, near Bear Island, in their search for the Italian explorer Umberto Nobile20. I have argued elsewhere that this widely publicised dramatic serial might have provided Auguste Herbst with the idea of the Gallé Polar bears series21.
An extensive account of the 1926 expedition of the Pourquoi Pas? appeared in several November and December issues of a local newspaper, Le Telegramme des Vosges, under the signature of René d’Avril, a prominent regional writer: “De Cherbourg au Groënland, Les impressions d’un savant nancéien qui fit partie de l’expédition Charcot”22 were the chronicled souvenirs of Paul Rémy, a zoologist from the university of Nancy. Paul Rémy had been one of four scientists from Nancy among Charcot’s collaborators in his Arctic endeavours, along with Pierre Bailly, a geologist, and Raymond Chevallier, a physicist. This explains in part the special interest the public from Nancy took in Charcot’s explorations in the second half of the 1920s.
But this was also reflective of their considerable popularity in France at the time. National magazines, like the famous L’Illustration, gave fully illustrated accounts of the Pourquoi Pas? expeditions. Charcot and his team had quickly published both popular books and scientific studies after their return in 1910, and they helped to spread the imagery of the poles and their fauna. One struggles to apprehend the breadth of Charcot’s popularity in France during the 1920s-1930s, only matched perhaps, later, by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his oceanographic expeditions in the 1950s-1970s. When Jean Charcot and his crew perished in the wreck of their ship, the Pourquoi Pas? IV, in September 1936, they were given a full national hommage, with funerals in Notre-Dame and live coverage on the nascent French radio. On the day of the ceremony, the 12th October 1936, class was suspended across the nation’s schools and universities, to be replaced by a lesson on Charcot’s exploits.
A Charcot’s conference in Nancy in January 1931.
In the mid to late 1920s, the depiction of polar animals on Nancy glassmakers’ creations in general much probably reflected this thirst of the public for all things related to Charcot’s expeditions in the Arctic as well as in the Antarctic. Before the explorer’s tragic demise in 1936, the local interest in his endeavours must have reached its peak on the 28th January 1931, when Jean-Baptiste Charcot came to Nancy and gave a conference on his travels in the Poirel concert hall.
This was a major conference, organised as a fundraising event for the benefit of a charity, the “Œuvres de Mer” and publicised weeks in advance23. All of Nancy high society attended the lecture with the local political, military and ecclesiastical authorities. The conference was a full success, according to several lengthy accounts published in the regional press the following days24, whose emphasis is put on the rich illustration provided by the photographic projections. One subject in particular seems to have stroked the public’s imagination, the penguins, on which Charcot spoke at length, commenting his many pictures25. For, while Charcot’s most recent travels were exclusively to the North pole, in the 1920s, he spoke at length in Nancy about his earlier ones, in the late 1900s, when he had the opportunity to take pictures of penguin colonies. So, the pictures shown in Nancy in January 1931 were certainly not new photographs. Most of them had already been published before WW1 in books and press articles, but one can imagine easily the effect their projection on a much bigger size produced, with Charcot’s commentary, on the Nancy public.
It seems therefore highly probable that, in the same way the coming in Nancy of the aviator Marc Bernard, in May 1927, resulted in the creation of the Seagull Gallé design, Jean-Baptiste Charcot’s conference in January 1931 enticed the Établissements Gallé (with Daum and Muller Frères) to make a Penguin series.
The Gallé Penguins’ Chronology.
It could seem counterintuitive, to say the least, to ascribe to the very end of the Établissements Gallé the creation of a series whose theme — the penguins — are, in fact, related to an expedition from 1907-1908. But, as has been demonstrated above, the Penguins vase belongs stylistically as well as technically to this late period rather than to the pre-WW1 one. An early 1931 creation date makes also a lot of sense from the perspective of the general Etablissements Gallé chronology: if production went on, up to the first months of 1936, it quickly dwindled after 1931. A large part of the workforce was laid off in August that year, and, more crucially, the main furnace was definitely shut off at the end of the seasonal production run. Throughout the 1932-1935 years, the factory’s glass output solely relied (it seems) on a large inventory of blanks from the preceding years. Being a new 1931 series, the Penguins vases were not part of that stock and their available inventory must have quickly sold out, without any possibility of restocking.
So, a late introduction explains the scarcity of this series, even though it was a smaller, and therefore cheaper, vase than the Polar bears or the Seagulls ones. It also explains, at least in part, why there was probably only one shape ever produced. The adaptation of a new decor to additional shapes and sizes largely was a function of its commercial success, as we’ve already seen on this site for the Lake of Como series, for instance. Conservative designs, which fitted perfectly in the usual line of products, could get made from the start in a dozen different shapes and sizes, but not this one. Was there a market for the Penguins in early 1931? In our hypothesis, the Gallé direction tried to find out, but, already seeing the catastrophic effects on its sales from the financial crisis26, probably decided to hedge its bet by limiting the output to a one shape-only small series. If Dézavelle’s testimony can be trusted on this, it means that the number of made Penguins vases could have been as low as 12 or 24, the usual figure for a small shaped series27.
There may have been some attempt by the Établissements Gallé to apply the Penguins design to blanks originally produced for some different patterns. This practice originated during WW1, when patriotic designs had to be applied on blanks from different series, because of the lack of a working furnace. After 1931, the same cause may have produced the same effects.
The Penguins vase could therefore be viewed as one of the very last creations of the Établissements Gallé, and, as such, one of the most rare too. This is in turn helps to explain its absence from all the available documentation — be it internal or external — so far, although it is not by any mean a necessary explanation. It is striking for instance that all three main iconic animals themed vases from the late 1920s (the Elephants, the Bears, and the Seagulls) are pictured in Pierre Perdrizet sales’ album, but not the Penguins28.
Conclusion: Its limited availability made it a widely copied vase.
One can speculate that in the 1930s already, the demand for these Penguins vases far surpassed their availability and that the Établissements Gallé could have sold easily more specimens that they had manufactured. The tragic death of Jean Charcot in 1936, and the national hommage that ensued, for instance, must have rekindled the public’s appetite for this design. In other words, the Polar exploration continued to appeal to the public’s interest well into the second half of the 20th century, and that may have been a factor in the rise of the Gallé fakes.
This explains, in turn, why, nowadays, there are far more copies than authentic Penguins vases on the market, to the point that it’s become difficult to a certain degree to identify the right original design. Forgers have it easy, in a way, with this design, since the scarcity of these vases make their appraisal all the more difficult.
[EDIT, 4 April 2023: I added the picture of the HDV Blandan unfinished vase and changed slightly the text accordingly]
© Samuel Provost, 26 August 2021.
Footnotes
I have to thank here Mike Moir for flagging this sale to me. My thanks also go to Steven Lewis and Justine Posalski with whom I have discussed in length this topic.
As always, readers are welcome to send me pictures of the additional specimens they might be aware of. I will add them to this little corpus with the appropriate documentation.
Recorded public prices for these Penguins vases have quite a wide range (from $10,500 to $46,689), in accord with their uncertain status, it seems.
This information was provided by this previous owner on a since deleted thread from the Facebook group French Art Glass in 2020.
Hôtel des ventes Blandan, Dimanche 26 novembre 1989-Dimanche 3 décembre 1989. The vase sold for a record F 890,000 (€ 135,679) and it features to this day on the auctions house’s webpage as an example of “attic treasure“ [link].
There is ample evidence of Gallé blanks being worked on and sold after the closure of the factory, a matter I will return to in a future instalment of this newsletter.
I have to thank Steven Lewis for providing me pictures and allowing their publication.
The missing accent on the “a” (that would be the preposition “à”) could then signal a foreign designer, and it’s true that the missing or reversed accent on Gallé is often an easy way to spot a forgery (not that other telltales are missing, of course).
The exact date is not known. The preserved correspondence between Auguste Herbst and Albert Daigueperce does strongly suggest that he was let go at this time too.
For instance, “Le Gala du 12 Mai. Le Comité des fêtes offrira un vase Gallé à l’aviateur Bernard”, Est Républicain, 8 May 1927.
The drawing is a project for a letter-holder, undated but probably later than 1931: it was published in S. Provost, “Établissements Gallé and the Industrial Mold-Blown, or “Relief” series of the 1920s”, Journal of Glass Studies, 60, 2018, fig. 19, p. 184. The drawing has been acquired by the Musée de l’École de Nancy.
I have to thank Stella van K. for providing me pictures of this tray, whose whereabouts are unfortunately unknown.
One cannot completely rule out that it a was a side project while still employed by the Ets Gallé, though, as other Gallé artists were known to have.
One of the most famous case is the Daum vs Delatte trial over the latter’s galinettes in 1923: Bardin Chr., Daum, 1878-1939 une industrie d’art lorraine, Serpenoise, 2004, p. 53-54.
Letter from the Gallé direction to Albert Daigueperce (notes from a), 22 February 1909, Archives Gallé Charpentier, private collection.
Vase Muller aux manchots, 13.2 cm, ca. 1935, Antiquités Art Nouveau (Nancy), 2019.
Daum Nancy, Penguin Vase, 7.6 x 10.2 cm, Chasen Antiques item #2201009.
Benoît Tallot, Les Frères Muller, Maîtres verriers à Lunéville, éditions Serpenoise, 2007, p. 115.
L’Est Républicain, 13 July 1928, p. 1.
Provost 2018, p. 184.
René d’Avril, “De Cherbourg au Groënland, Les impressions d’un savant nancéien qui fit partie de l’expédition Charcot“, Le Télégramme des Vosges, 25/11/1926, p. 4, 15/12/1926, p. 4, 25/12/1926 p. 4.
As usual, Charcot named “Pingouins” what are known today as “Manchots” in French.
See on this the available sales numbers I referenced in “One Million Gallé?” (NANCI #9).
Dézavelle 1974, p. 27. René Dézavelle was among the workers dismissed in August 1931.
Pierre Perdrizet was the younger brother of Paul Perdrizet, Émile Gallé’s son-in-law and director of the Établissements Gallé after 1914. Pierre Perdrizet became the main Gallé traveling salesman in 1920.
Bibliography
J.-B. Charcot, Le "Français" au Pôle Sud : journal de l'expédition antarctique française, 1903-1905, Flammarion, 1906 [link].
J.-B. Charcot, Le "Pourquoi-pas" ? dans l'Antarctique : journal de la deuxième expédition au Pôle sud, 1908-1910, Flammarion, 1910 [link].
S. Provost, “Établissements Gallé and the Industrial Mold-Blown, or “Relief” series of the 1920s”, Journal of Glass Studies, 60, 2018, p. 269-293.
B. Tallot, Les Frères Muller, Maîtres verriers à Lunéville, éditions Serpenoise, 2007.
How to cite this article : Samuel Provost, “Fake and Real Gallé Penguins vases”, Newsletter on Art Nouveau Craftwork & Industry, no 14, 26 August 2021 [link].