On Gallé’s Polar Animals Again: a short note on the Seals glass series by Louis Hestaux for Émile Gallé (1900).
An addendum to the article on “Fake and Real Penguins”.
In my previous article, on the Penguins' series by the Établissements Gallé, I made the point that it belonged to the larger theme of Polar animals that could be related to Charcot’s expeditions in the 1920s and 1930s. Among the Gallé artwork I presented to support this hypothesis was a set of nesting tables, whose three tabletops feature each one of the three animals that could be related to the Polar explorations, i.e., from the biggest to the smallest, the Bears, the Polar Seals and the Seagulls.
And I underlined that the Penguins were missing from this ensemble, although there are known Penguins wood marquetries, such as trays or side tables, that could have been used to great effect to complete the set – most of the time, nesting tables came with four, not three tables. This was an argument to assign the Penguins to a later date than the other three. I mentioned that these designs were cross-medium ones, that is, they existed both on glass and wood in the Gallé line. Doing so, I acknowledged that the Polar Seals glass series was the rarest of all. This remark still holds, of course, but I have to revise the potential date of this series, in light of some information I had overlooked.
The Tokyo specimen.
The only specimen of a Polar seals vase I could find is the one sold in Tokyo by Ader-Picard-Tajan and Est Ouest, in November 1990, at the apex of the Gallé craze on the Japanese market1. The experts did not provide a date for this vase at the time, but their attribution was to “Gallé”, that is to the Établissements Gallé, rather than to “Émile Gallé”, making it clear that they believed it to belong to the post-1904 period like most of the acid etched high-priced pieces in their sale — perhaps, already, because of the comparison with the other Polar animals-themed series. Unfortunately, the only available picture of the vase in the catalogue is in black and white, rather small, and marred by light reflections so that it is difficult to say anything specific about it. The accompanying text described the vase as a “small baluster vase in multi-layered glass, acid-etched to reveal an animated scene with blue seals, bluish-white ice floes silhouetted against the opaline and shiny amber ground layer”. This description seems pretty consistent with the techniques and the colour ranges in use for the 1920s series, so at first look it seems possible to relate the vase to the much more common and known Seagull and Polar Bears ones. The composition is roughly the same as on the Polar Bears: the big shaped animals are the main subject, in the foreground, while the background depicts an Arctic landscape.
But the vase’s shape is somewhat problematic – this is not one found in this late period. And one crucial detail in the description points to a much earlier date for its making: the signature is etched under its base. This alone should be enough either to revise the date or to doubt the attribution altogether. Établissements Gallé’s signatures are never featured on the underside of a glass object because the name is meant to be advertised and so clearly legible to the owner/customer. There is still much uncertainty about the signatures' system they employed, but this at least holds true. Note that this mistake was easy to make at the time: accurate knowledge of Gallé’s signatures and their chronology was still lacking in 1990. François Le Tacon’s seminal study on the subject was published in 1993 only2. So, one can guess that the signature featured on this vase is plain enough to look like a post-1904 one: it’s probably a simple etched “Gallé”, without too much complication on the script, and without any added information (no “Cristallerie d’E. Gallé”, “Nancy” or “Modèle déposé”).
Furthermore, the glare on the vase surface can also be taken as a clue to an earlier date (at least pre-1914) as it hints to fire polishing, a finishing technique that was common in the late 1890s, phased out in the 1910s and that is absent from glass series in the 1920s. Finally, the “bubbly” aspect of the mother layer is not consistent either with a post-1904 glass.
A letter from Henriette Gallé in July 1900.
The information I had forgotten about comes from the correspondence between Henriette and Émile Gallé, which is bristling with such overlooked nuggets. In July 1900, Henriette Gallé wrote several letters to her husband while he was staying in Plombières, a spa resort in the Southern Vosges. On the 18th July, she reported back from a supervisory visit to the factory with the following news:3
J’ai été à la fabrique: tout le monde a du travail. Mr Hestaux fait des dessins pour une série de phoques et icebergs : les aquarelles sont jolies, mais comment l’acide traitera-t-il les phoques ? Il ne faudrait vraiment pas faire toute une série de phoques ; il y a des oiseaux dans les pays du nord qui seraient plus gracieux, me semble-t-il. Mais si tu lui en parles, ne lui laisse pas entendre que j’ai fait une observation sur les phoques.
Unfortunately, Émile Gallé’s answer to his wife is lost or held in a private collection, as are most of his letters from this period. The earliest published letter from him following this enquiry dates from August, 2, and it does not contain anything on the subject, which is not raised again either by Henriette. Lacking any further written testimonies, we’re left with the Tokyo vase to speculate what happened next. For, there is no doubt that the vase’s design comes from the watercolours from Hestaux that Henriette Gallé saw in July 1900.
One can make several comments on Henriette Gallé’s remarks about Hestaux’s drawings:
Louis Hestaux had large freedom to decide on what kind of compositions he could work on. The way Henriette Gallé tells her husband about this particular project does not suggest the idea came from him. This does not come as a big surprise, for Hestaux was the chief of the designers’ team. But of course, Émile Gallé had the final say on the viability of each design: the name the made pieces bore was his.
The Polar Seals compositions Hestaux was working on were from the start designed for a glass industrial series, with an intended large production run, which Henriette Gallé explicitly disapproves of for aesthetic reasons — seals are not gracile creatures.
This series was conceived as an acid etched glass one, and not a wheel cut one, which fits with the profile of a large-scale series.
The worries expressed by Henriette Gallé about the design’s rendering by the acid etching are most interesting. They remind that at the time this was a technique Gallé was still refining and learning to use efficiently on an industrial scale, a fact well attested by the many defects the smallest pieces from this period do possess. It does also demonstrate the degree of technical details Henriette Gallé involved herself in at an early stage, a crucial development for her takeover of the operation after her husband’s passing. At the same time, she is careful to present her disapproval as a suggestion, and she does not want Hestaux to know of her criticism: the time of her leadership has yet to come, and she is still only the watchful wife.
The month of July, in the Gallé cyclical work calendar, was precisely a period when the designers were researching new projects. The same letter mentions that Auguste Herbst, for his part, is researching small furniture projects, the equivalent of the acid etched mass-produced glass series. In July 1900, the Exposition Universelle was in full bloom in Paris4, but, in Nancy, the Gallé designers were busy preparing the product line for the Fall and the big end-of-year sales season – that would benefit from the exhibition’s added exposure of their works.
In this context, the extreme rarity of the Polar Seals design is telling. It’s not a series advertised by the big retail stores. To the best of my knowledge, there is every indication that it remained a small series, if even that. This means that while Émile Gallé did not kill, upon his return, Hestaux’s project, he was not satisfied enough with the result to order a big production run. Whether he listened to Henriette’s advice or to Émile Lang’s, or even waited for feedback from Albert Daigueperce after sending a sample to Paris to gauge the future clients’ interest, this design’s production was severely curtailed.
Louis Hestaux and animal designs.
One of the main takeaways from Henriette Gallé’s letter is of course the identification of the painter Louis Hestaux as the designer of this series. It’s therefore worth having a look of its place in his general artwork. The whereabouts of his Polar Seals watercolours are unfortunately unknown and they would have stood apart in the sizeable collection of his drawings the Musée de l’École de Nancy does own, thanks to several donations from the artist’s family in the 1970s-1980s mainly5. For there is almost nothing remotely comparable in this catalogue: large mammals seem simply absent from his repertoire, with few exceptions.
The most remarkable of these is the composition of an Alpine mountain landscape, with several Alpine ibex on the foreground, designed for a tall baluster vase (see above). The project was part of Jean Rouppert’s collection, the Gallé drawings he took with him when he left the company in 19246. The general composition is similar to the Polar Seals landscape, and there’s even a strong resemblance in the mountain peaks’ profile in the background. I am not aware of this project having been made into glass, and if it was, the series must have been very limited. The drawing is undated. From what is known about Hestaux and his vacations in the Alps, where he must have gotten the inspiration for this design, it’s probably a later work than the Polar Seals, maybe from the 1910s.
So is the case of the second drawing one can vaguely relate to this 1900 creation: it pictures a battle between an eagle and a white bear on a snowy war torn landscape, a clear symbol on the war on the Eastern front during the First World War7. It’s worth mentioning because of the white bear, which is reminiscent of the later Polar Bear, attributed to Auguste Herbst. This second watercolour belongs to the symbolist series Louis Hestaux painted during the First World War, where the belligerents are often pictured as animals: the German Eagle fighting the Lorraine Thistles or the Gallic roost8. It therefore dates from 1914-1915, in all probability, and at least before 1917 and the end of hostilities on that front.
The point is that large mammals themed artworks were very rare in the Gallé line while Émile Gallé was alive. And while Louis Hestaux painted a number of related compositions, most of them look to be later than 1904, and none was ever made into a successful glass series. In that regard, the contrast is quite strong with Auguste Herbst’s projects from the 1920s.
Conclusion: an early attempt at a Polar animal-themed glass series with no immediate following.
It’s perhaps not by chance if Hestaux made this attempt at an exotic animal design while Émile Gallé was away. Louis Hestaux’ personal artworks, the pieces he exhibited under his sole name in various venues, demonstrate that his preferred range of decorative themes was a bit different from Gallé’s. So, left to his devices by Émile Gallé’s absence, he chose to stray away from the floral or aquatic themes that dominated the Gallé line at that time, to experience something different.
There is also a larger point to be made. This is a remarkably rare instance where a cameo, acid etched vase’s date can be revised by pushing back its proposed chronology, rather than the reverse. It’s much more common to have to push it forward and to assign to the Établissements Gallé a piece that was until then attributed to Émile Gallé — as I have done several times already on this newsletter. In this case, the mistake is easy to understand: animals apart from fish and birds are an exceedingly rare occurrence in glass designs from the 1890s-1900s and exotic ones like the Polar seal were practically unheard of. But these confusions also occur in part because the Établissements Gallé reprised some themes from Émile Gallé’s time and gave them a new life.
The question remains of course if there was after all a Polar Seals glass series in the 1920s-1930s, or if Auguste Herbst contented itself with the wooden version of the design.
© Samuel Provost, 6 November 2021.
Footnotes
Gallé, Phoques polaires, lot 151, in Ader Picard Tajan, Est Ouest, Jean-Pierre and Florence Camard (experts), Très important ensemble de verreries par Argy-Rousseau, Daum, Décorchemont, Gallé, Michel, Muller, provenant divers grands collectionneurs, Tokyo, 20th November 1990, p. 130. The vase made FF 173,610, hammer price, at the auction, falling just short of the FF 18,.000 lower estimate, but it would most probably struggle to reach this today, especially with the adjustment for inflation (€ 41,740). On the other hand, it’s true that a (doubtful in my opinion) Penguins vase made $46,689 in July 2016.
Le Tacon, F. 1993, “Les techniques et les marques sur verre des Établissements Gallé après 1918”, Le Pays Lorrain, vol. 74, no 4, p. 203-217.
Letter from Henriette Gallé to Émile, Nancy, 18th July 1900, in Amphoux, Thiébaut 2014, p. 153-155.
It opened on the 15th April and closed on the 12th November.
See Boyer 2002.
I am deeply thankful to Ronald Muller for giving me access to his pictures of this collection.
Louis Hestaux, Aigle attaquant un ours blanc, SY 4, watercolour, 57.4 x 39.7 cm, Musée de l’École de Nancy. The author of the catalogue raisonné failed to grasp the symbolism of this drawing.
On these decors, see Provost S., 2016, « La marqueterie, un art de guerre des Établissements Gallé », Le Pays Lorrain, 97, 2, 2016, p. 139-148 <hal-01322067>.
Bibliography
Boyer D., 2002, Étude du fonds de dessins Louis Hestaux au Musée de l’École de Nancy, Catalogue raisonné, Mémoire de maîtrise sous la direction de Valérie Thomas et François Pupil, Université Nancy II, 2002.
Gallé É., Gallé H., Amphoux J. and Thiébaut Ph. (ed.) 2014, Correspondance 1875-1904, Genève, La Bibliothèque des arts.
How to cite this article : Samuel Provost, “On Gallé’s Polar Animals Again: a short note on the Seals glass series by Louis Hestaux for Émile Gallé (1900)”, Newsletter on Art Nouveau Craftwork & Industry, no 15, 6 November 2021 [link].