One Million Gallés ?
One Million Gallés ?
A tentative assessment of the Cristallerie Gallé's quantitative output from 1894 to 1936
New information on the production of Gallé glass underlines the huge numbers both of different series and individual items sold from the 1880s to the closure of the factory in 1936. While this new data remains insufficient to provide accurate and definite numbers for the glass output, it allows probing several hypotheses, based on shipped lots and gross sales figures. The overall number of Gallé glass items made during a little more than this half century of existence can now be estimated as probably well over a million.
Introduction : new remedies to the lack of data following the destruction and dispersal of the relevant archives.
Just how many Gallé vases were made? This is a vexing question which is of some importance to collectors and antiques sellers alike. If value is a direct function of rarity, then it is paramount to understand which types of products are more uncommon than others and why. A simple survey of antiques shops and auctions will tell you that there are thousands of Gallé glass pieces sold each year. The price range on these items is of a staggering magnitude, from less than a few hundreds euros for the smallest trinkets to several hundreds of thousands for the most sought after masterpieces — which may still well be nonetheless industrial series and not unique artistic creations. The basic understanding of the question is that there is of course a huge difference between the art work of Émile Gallé and his industrial series, not to mention those of his heirs in the Établissements Gallé. While he devoted much of his time researching exquisite one of a kind glass works, which were made in single digit copies at most and then could sell in the thousand francs range, he also developed techniques and designs to make cheap small vases (mainly called porte-violettes), marketed by the dozens for a few francs apiece: Le Tacon estimated that the price ratio between these two categories was as high as 1:60 to 1:2401. In a revealing letter to Albert Daigueperce from the 17th July 1899, Émile Gallé thus explains that he cannot accept an order for three series of porte-violettes for only 25 items each and that it must be increased to at least 50 pieces each. He then details the rebate that would be available by raising further this number to 75 pieces each : the price drops from Fr. 8 and Fr. 6 to respectively Fr. 7.50 and Fr. 5.50.2 This example shows the kind of serial glass work the Nancy factory was busy with, already in Émile Gallé’s lifetime, churning out thousands of relatively cheap glass trinkets a year.
One of the many problems with the study of the Gallé productions is that the factory did not publish a yearly or at least periodical catalogue, contrary to, say, Legras or the Cristalleries de Nancy. There were sales catalogues though, for the use of the sales representatives of the factory : one, which is still kept in the Gallé family archives, belonged to Pierre Perdrizet, a brother of the firm’s director after 1914, Paul Perdrizet. Although incomplete, this catalogue is a simple collection of photographs showing the main glass and furniture lines of products at the end of the 1920s — Pierre Perdrizet took over the representative job only in 1920. A second catalogue, better known, belongs to the Rakow Library : likewise, it’s from the 1920s — 1927 to be precise — but it’s much more extensive than the Perdrizet copy. Its limitation comes from the fact that it was apparently produced for the American market, since prices are indicated in dollars (when there is a currency abbreviation, which is not always the case), but it’s notable that the sizes given are still in centimetres rather than in inches (sometimes the US measurement has been added). Although the number of items pictured is far higher, the range of products is somewhat more limited — furniture is absent, rather famous 1920s glass designs are missing too, etc. This 1927 catalogue gives nonetheless a fair idea of the number of different shapes and sizes one might expect for a particular design. The same information can be derived from some advertisements made by the main Gallé resellers in newspapers and artistic magazines. But neither these nor the remaining catalogues are really that helpful in determining the overall number of different designs produced or the number of pieces made and sold.
For that, we would need some commercial archives from the factory, which are mainly lost after being destroyed — intentionally burnt in a rather sad autodafé — in 1936 when the factory closed for good. But all is not lost, for we still have the following resources at our disposal to work out an overall quantitative estimate of the production :
— some general accountancy documents from the factory have survived in private collections, most notably from the archives of Albert Daigueperce, in charge of the Gallé depot in Paris until 1920 and from the Gallé family itself ;
— the inventory and sales books from the same Albert Daigueperce were still available until the early 1980s, when they became lost : that enabled several researchers to take notes or make copies which, while being poor substitutes of the originals, give some precious secondhand information.
— other original documents are preserved in notarial acts kept in the Archives départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle, such as the wills of Émile Gallé or the company statutes from 1925 — documents which include the complete stock inventories from the factory for instance ;
— personal testimonies from Gallé workers and designers, who wrote accounts or gave interviews about their time in the factory, describing in sometimes great details the different aspects of their job there.
— the personal correspondences of the Gallé family, beginning with the letters between Émile Gallé and his wife Henriette, then pursuing later with those between their son-in-law, Paul Perdrizet, and the Gallé sisters, do possess more than a few valuable nuggets about the inner workings of the factory.
An early attempt at giving an estimate
The bulk of these archival documents was unavailable to François Le Tacon when he proposed his estimates in his 1998 book about Émile Gallé’s glasswork.3 He then used two parallel methods to tabulate the numbers of glass items produced during the different periods of the Gallé family activity.
He made his first calculation from the number of workers and their productivity, taking in account the difference of work time spent on the pieces according to the main technique in use during the successive periods. He presumably had a good idea of the time it took a painter-decorator to apply the several layers of bitumen on a piece, thanks to the oral testimonies from several women who used to work there. He also knew their numbers in the workshop for the 1920s, and could work backward for the earlier periods, with the help of some archival documents, regarding the workforce numbers or the evolution of the factory size. This allowed him to establish a rough ratio between the different phases of Gallé’s production in the overall production : going backward, these were 1919-1936, from Émile Gallé’s death to 1914, from the opening of the cristallerie in Nancy in 1894 to 1904, from 1867 to 1904 (Émile Gallé’s direction), from 1850 to 1867 (Charles Gallé’s direction). F. Le Tacon then used a second method to independently control this first estimate, by painstakingly checking on the public sales catalogues over three decades and dividing the several thousands of Gallé items reviewed between the main periods of production. His main finding was that the last period (1919-1936) had a cumulated production largely surpassing all the previous ones.
The resulting estimate from this double calculation was a rough total of 200,000 glass pieces from 1850 to 1936, distributed as follow :
These estimates present several problems, now that additional information has emerged. The chronology of the operation has been revised : the First World War is no longer a black hole because the factory was presumed to shut down ; it’s no longer a clear-cut divide in the manufacturing processes and part of the series traditionally ascribed to the pre-1914 period (part of the Mk III signed items) must now be pushed forward to the 1914-1920 timespan (and perhaps even a bit later). So, the main assumption under which the previous estimates were made, i.e., the pre-1914/post-1919 ratio, isn’t entirely accurate. This probably would not suffice in itself to change dramatically the picture, but there is also the question of the productivity in the “hot work hall” as well as in the decor workshops to consider, which may have been underestimated by a significant margin. The result, as we shall see, is that the real total number of glass items produced from 1894 to 1936 most probably is at least the quintuple of Le Tacon’s estimate.
A first new estimate from the inventory lot numbers
Two different sets of data are now available from the archives to calculate new estimates, on an entirely different basis, the actual sales books from the Paris depot for the period 1879-1920, not some raw production estimates from the factory. Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier had the opportunity to review them in the late 1960s-early 1970s, to make some notes and copies of important documents. From these archives, we thus have partial lists of sales numbers, to which one can add some annual balance sheets and overall revenue statements, coming this time from the family archives. It’s therefore possible to reconstruct a somewhat accurate picture of the sales made in Paris and, knowing their share in the overall gross sales revenue, to propose an estimate first for the total number of items sold up to September 1920, and second, from the relative shares of ceramics, wood and glass, for the total number of glass items.
The marketing strategies of Émile Gallé and later of the Établissements Gallé deserve a comprehensive study in their own right, but, for the purpose at hand, a few preliminary remarks will suffice. The retail sales were made through all kinds of department stores and specialised outlets which could order their wares in three different manners : (1) direct orders to the Nancy factory, (2) orders through representative salesmen who set up temporary shop in big national and regional fairs, and (3) through major depots whose management was contracted to a steward. There were three such depots, Paris (opened in March 1879), Frankfurt (February 1897) and London (February 1901)4, and they were by far the most important players: they accounted for at least 70% of the gross sales revenue, and among them, Paris was the crown jewel with at least 50% of the total revenue from 1901 to 1920.5 Doubling the Paris depot numbers provides thus a good enough estimate of the total sales during much of this period. For the earlier period, there is no data available at the moment for the share of these Paris sales in the total revenue and the accuracy of the general estimate significantly drops. But it seems almost certain that, if anything, the Paris share was even larger in the 1879-1900 period than in the 1901-1920. In fact, the long-term trend was seeing a slow but steady decline in this Paris relative share from 1901 (57%) to 1920 (50%), while of course overall sales were skyrocketing at the time (+308% total value in gross sales). This trend may have been reversed after 1920, though, because of the reorganisation of the sales following Daigueperce’s departure and the closing of Frankfurt’s depot.6
The Paris depot lots’ numbers
The simplest, most straightforward estimate comes from the lots’ numbers recorded in the sales books from the Paris depot. They unfortunately do not provide a straight up annual number of items because it does not look like this number was even tabulated.7 What they registered was the arrival in the depot of the orders made by its clients. These orders comprised different lots’ numbers each corresponding to a given type of items : this was the number written on the label glued under its base. One lot could thus contain any number of identical objects (for different clients who had ordered them at the same time), from only one large vase or one bookcase to one hundred or more of the smaller candy boxes or porte-violettes for instance. In the Charpentier files, some lots are given dates, and it is thus possible to follow the growth of the Gallé sales during the Daigueperces’ tenure in Paris, as well as to trace the introduction of new designs.8 The last dated number known is 91,500 on the 31st August 1920, when Albert Daigueperce finally left the depot with his archives. More than forty years later, he personally gave Charpentier a handwritten note summarising the volume of merchandise sent to the depot in this manner:9
Arrêté au 31 août 1920, arrêté au n° 91500
Ce qui peut représenter un minimum de 91 500 x 4 environ 366 000 [pièces] au dépôt.
A ce nombre doit [sic] s’ajouter les objets placés directement plus ceux de l’autre dépôt et des voyageurs.
En quittant, il ne restait plus que 110 verreries et 35 meubles [soit au total] 145 [objets].
Daigueperce does not say when this count began. Since it is specific to the Paris depot, it must refer either to its creation by Marcelin Daigueperce himself in 1879, or to his succession by his son Albert in 1896, rather than to the opening of the cristallerie in Nancy, that is the building of a fusion furnace, when Gallé began making his glass. As I have already noted in a previous article, this numbering was almost certainly reset in late 1920, when the depot was trusted to a new steward, Willie Mohrenwitz.10 By analogy, the creation of the depot in 1879 is therefore the preferable solution.11 It is reinforced by another observation : the depot sales books did not belong to the Établissements Gallé but to the steward, otherwise Albert Daigueperce could not have taken them away like he did in 1920. So, the 91,500 lots figure does track the number of orders received from 1879 to 1920 by the Paris depot under the Daigueperce family management.
In his little explanatory note, Albert Daigueperce estimated the average number of items per lot as four, a number confirmed by Charpentier in her files. How reliable is this estimate? Only one preserved document so far allows some kind of verification : the Relevé des différences existantes entre l’Inventaire et nos livres, i.e., the inventory reconciliation for 1912, dated from February 1st, 1913. This most important document lists 172 lots for which existed a difference between the sales recorded in Paris by Daigueperce and the shipments made by the Nancy factory. The average number of items per lot in this inventory is a little over 12, but it is heavily skewed upward by its function: large orders were for obvious reasons more prone to handling mistakes.12 If we remove from this list the largest lots (up to 260 items under only one lot number !), we effectively get an average of 4 items. Furthermore, It is clear that this number must have increased from 1894 to 1920, so that the average makes sense over this long period but represents an order of magnitude rather than a precise estimate.
The approximate calculation of 366,000 items presented by Albert Daigueperce looks therefore (very) roughly validated. But, of course, these items received by the Paris depot belonged to three different kinds of wares, earthenware (faïence), glass and wood. Earthenware dominated the earlier period before being all but abandoned in the second half of the 1890s, when Émile Gallé put most of his effort on glass and wood. For this reason, it looks safer and easier not to try accounting for the glass production earlier than 1894 : the glass items we miss from this probably are counterbalanced by the remaining ceramics orders for the 1894-1904 period. In any case, these figures pale in comparison to the huge glass production numbers after 1894 and, if we could estimate them, their effect on the total would be almost negligible.
For there is unfortunately no way to separate these three categories from the lots numbers alone, nor there is any data available to distinguish each ware’s share in the gross sales numbers before 1901. Beginning that year, the relative shares of glass and wood sales are known in details, thanks to another important document, the Répartition du résultat des ventes annuelles, for the 1901-1913 period. This table ignores the London depot — probably lumped together with the factory’s share — as well as any earthenware sales, confirming that, by 1901, they had all but stopped.13 The gross revenue numbers show a stagnation and even a small decline in value for the wood sales during the period, while the glass sales take off in a dramatic fashion. The result is that the wood goes from representing a little less than half the gross revenue in 1901 (45.5%) to just 10% in 1913, and the numbers are about the same (with a difference within 1%) whether one counts only the Paris depot or all the sales.
While the lot numbers for years before 1901 are not yet available, they can be extrapolated from the known data beginning in 1904, and somewhat verified, given that we have on the other hand the gross sales numbers for part of that period. In April 1904, orders began with a lots number around 43,300 and there were at that time around 2,000 additional lots per year.14 Applying a simple linear regression to the previous years, one can add 18,300 more lots from 1894 to 1900, that is for the period when earthenware declined sharply while being replaced by glass, due to the opening of the full cristallerie in Nancy.15 This means an approximate total of 66,500 lots, or around 245,000 items, were shipped to Paris between 1894 and 1920.
Another crucial piece of information from the Daigueperce note is that the lots numbering was specific to the depot’s orders and not reflecting the whole operation’s output : the other outlets’ orders (direct sales from the factory, orders from the salesmen and Frankfurt) had to be added to this number. Each outlet’s accurate share is known for the 1901-1913 period, at least in gross revenue, thanks to the annual sales numbers : Paris has a 53% share over this period, down from 57% in 1901 and probably more before Frankfurt’s opening.16 On the other hand, its share dropped during and after the war when the factory was handling directly most of the orders.17 It does also mean that his remarks must be taken with some caution because he left in such bad terms with the family. For simplicity, the Paris share over the 1894-1920 period will be estimated here at 50%. This means the total numbers of items shipped to the various outlets or directly to the retailers could have reached 532,000 (from 133,000 lots) over the same timespan.
To get a number for glass only, the final step is to settle on an estimate for each of the three wares’ share. This share is known for sure, in value only, from the Répartition des ventes annuelles for the 1901-1913 period, with 83% coming from glass against 17% from wood. Given that wood objects were, on average, 6 to 8 times more expensive than glass items, the share of the former in actual item numbers is way less than 17%. In September 1904, the stock inventory had a 6:1 ratio between the numbers of glass and wood items, in the Nancy factory, and a 10.6:1 ratio in the Paris depot. A 9:1 ratio is therefore a somewhat arbitrary and conservative estimate over the period : it was noticeably lower before 1904, but this figure then increased steadily until reaching 24:1 in the 1925 stock inventory of the factory. In other words, wood sales at best stagnated while glass sales took off. Subtracting roughly 10% of the total, we get therefore about 478,800 glass pieces for the 1894-1920 period, or around 17,700 pieces a year (with a continuous increase which saw this number more than double the final years before WW1). This is of course a crude estimate, but it is in line with the production capacity of the factory (as will be shown in another essay) and, above all, it can be verified with an entirely different method.
Lots numbers from the 1920s and a new overall estimate
Unlike for the 1901-1920 period, there are no known preserved archives from the Paris depot. Any data regarding the lots numbers has to come from the retailers or clients (in the exceptional instance where they kept the invoices) or from the objects themselves (the numbered labels). This is a matter that will deserve its study, but for the moment let’s just note that the Établissements Gallé continued numbering the lots in the 1920s, after a reset of their count coming most probably in September 1920. They also introduced two new types of labels, the first one with the sole Gallé name (thus dropping the first name Émile), and the second one with the Établissements Gallé designation. I will assume that these were in successive and not parallel use, as the matching signatures on the vases do suggest. The highest recorded figures on these labels therefore provide a minimum number of lots for each of these two periods: as of this writing, they are respectively 31,603 for a Mk IV signed small floral vase18 and 33,338 for a Mk IV signed small night light.19 Their total, rounded to 65,000, can then be considered as the bare minimum number of lots marketed after 1920. While it is, possibly — most probably ? — underestimated by several thousands, it may not be too far off the mark because, over the corresponding 15 years of production (1921-1935), it translates to an average just above 4,300 lots per year (compared to 4,500 in 1913-1914 which were Daigueperce’s best years). This would seem perhaps too low, would it be not for the drastic slowing down of the production after the furnace was shut down in 1931 (see below) : as an average over the whole post-WW1 period, it’s quite plausible. When one considers this stretched out ending as well as the difficult restart of the factory in 1919-1920, there really were only 10 or 11 full productive years after WW1.
With the same average lot size (4 items) as before, certainly a too conservative estimate, we get to 260,000 items. Once small wood furniture is subtracted following again the same method as before, the total number of glass items would be around 234,000. If we increase the average lot size to 8 items, which seems very possible looking at the few data point we have, like the inventory reconciliation of 1912, then we get respectively to 390,000 items and 351,000 glass objects.
In the Daigueperce years, the lots numbers provided an estimate for roughly half the overall number of items sold. Keeping the same ratio, by lack of an alternative, we get between ca. 470,000 and 700,000 items for 1921-1936. The highest end of this interval does not look so outlandish when one considers that it means a ca. 46,000 items/year average or just above the 1913-1914 figure (see below).
Without knowing if this label system applied only to the Paris depot or to all the sales, even ignoring if the use of this lot numbering changed or not after 1920, it’s difficult to make further progress. The matter is also complicated by the fact that the Établissements Gallé continued to use the pre-1920 type of label, “Émile Gallé • Nancy-Paris”. There is no way at this time to know if this secondary use was specific to a market or to an outlet, with a different lot numbering, or if it was random, within the same numbering. The signature and the design usually allow distinguishing between pre-1920 vases sporting this label and post-1920 ones, but this is not always the case.
One specimen in particular is quite problematic : a Mk IV signed relief vase, with a decor of water lilies (sold by Christie’s on 26/10/2006, lot 168) features an “Émile Gallé • Nancy-Paris” label apparently bearing not one but two numbers, 1,300 and 71,985 (no picture of the label provided, alas). The vase type and its signature make that second number a late 1920s-early 1930s lot number, if it is genuine at all. It sure does look suspiciously high and difficult to reconcile with the two other labels’ serial numbers, stopping their count (so far) in the low 30,000s. One solution would be to ascribe the continuous use of these old labels to one outlet while the others would have adopted the new ones.
In the end, the lot numbers prove to be an insufficient gauge to provide an accurate estimate of the overall glass production between 1894 and 1936. It’s serviceable enough for the 1894-1920 period, thanks to the Daigueperce files, but it becomes woefully inadequate without them after that, when all three variables (the number of lots, the lots’ average size and the share of the Paris depot in the total sales) are but educated guesses. At this point, a provisional conclusion is that, with 478,000 glass items before 1920 and at least the same, and perhaps one and half as much down to 1936, the Gallé cristallerie’s total output fell somewhere in the 900,000-1,200,000 range. To reduce this considerable uncertainty, other data are needed.
The gross sales revenue numbers and the stock inventories.
A second calculation method to estimate the overall number of glass items produced relies on the gross sales revenue. These figures are preserved for two separate periods of the factory : from 1901 to 1913, with the already mentioned Répartition du résultat des ventes annuelles, and in part from 1929 to 1936, with yearly balance sheets from an accountant firm. The calculation is straightforward, once the average wholesale price of a glass piece is established. This figure can be obtained or evaluated from the four known stock inventories : the full factory inventories from 1904 and 1925, the Paris depot’s inventory reconciliation from 1912 and the final Paris depot inventory from 1920.
The gross sales revenue numbers from 1894 to 1920.
The glass gross sales figures are known for 1901 to 1913 thanks to the general revenue table that is the Répartition du résultat des ventes annuelles. The 1914 figure appears in another document comparing the 1913 and 1914 monthly sales until the closing of the depot in July, because of the war. We thus get Fr. 8,800,000 in glass sales for the 1901-1914 period.
The Daigueperce files also allow to easily obtain an excellent estimate for the glass sales from 1894 to 1900, assuming that the revenue structure was very similar to the 1901-1903 one : a first document, the Tableau mensuel du chiffre d’affaires faites par les Dépôt du 1er Janvier 1888 au 31 Décembre 1908, gives the Paris sales’ figure, in particular for the 1894 to 1900 period requested here (Fr. 1,773,500) ; from which, with Paris’ share standing at 57% in 1901, a total sales estimate can be extrapolated (Fr. 3,111,000) and then a glass sales figure calculated, knowing that it amounted to 68% of the sales’ value (rounded to Fr. 2,100,000).
For the 1915-1920 period, a reconstruction of the revenue makes use of the Paris sales’ fees. A second document, the Relevé des sommes touchées chaque année par Mr Daigueperce au 31 Décembre de chaque année, provides the yearly sales’ fees the Paris steward received from Gallé, from 1898 to 1913. It allows to calculate the sales percentage he was receiving on average, compared to the gross sales revenue (9.8%). This document stops in 1913, but the fees’ amounts for 1914-1919 are given in a letter from Albert Daigueperce to Willy Mohrenwitz, his successor in Paris in September 1920.20 Keeping the same average sales’ percentage, the gross sales number for Paris can be estimated at Fr. 963,000 (in 1914 Francs) between 1915 and 1919. Finally, for 1920, another letter from Daigueperce gives the outstanding orders’ amount on the 1st September, from which the overall year’s revenue can roughly be inferred (Fr. 525,000, still in 1914 Fr). The Paris revenue from 1915 to 1920 is therefore about Fr. 1,490,000 ; the Gallé total sales about the double, with 60% coming from glass.21 The glass revenue for this period can thus represent Fr. 1,700,000.
It follows that the total gross sales revenue from 1894 to 1920 for the Gallé cristallerie stands at Fr 12,800,000. To get the number of items this figure represents, we have to estimate next their average wholesale price.
The average glass item’s price and the number of pieces made from 1894 to 1920.
If the Daigueperce sales books were still available, this matter would be easily settled. Unfortunately, Françoise-Thérèse Charpentier, in the notes she took about them, wrote very little about the bulk of the production, the industrial series that weren’t part of her research. So, we have to make do with the few original documents that survived. There are three relevant inventories to get an average price from for this first period : 1904, 1912 and 1920. Each of them lists glass series or items and presumably their wholesale price. There is no doubt in this regard for the inventory reconciliation of 1912 and the final stock inventory of 1920 because both concern the Paris depot and record the items’ wholesale price paid by the retailers. The problem is that these two documents, while more detailed, provide a far smaller sample of the yearly offering : in value, they represent Fr. 12,400 in 1912 and Fr. 12,480 in 1920 against Fr. 91,000 for the 1904 inventory.
The post mortem 1904 inventory is therefore more representative, but its information is also less detailed (it lists and prices whole series rather than individual items) and there could be a doubt about the nature of the listed values:22 do they reflect each series’ production cost or its average wholesale price? The same question arises for the 1925 inventory too (see below). There is no information on this nor in general on the Établissements Gallé’s accountancy practices. It should be noted that the accountant job was a sore point in the company’s history : time and again, from Émile Gallé’s time to the early 1920s, the need to recruit or to keep a good accountant arises in the family correspondence. After the company’s incorporation in July 1925, and perhaps only in the late 1920s, an external accountants' firm was hired to provide help in this matter. But before that, the company looks like the family business it really was, and it seems to have shunned more sophisticated advices.23 One would not be surprised therefore if the September 1904 stock was simply valued at its current wholesale price. The same series have identical prices in the Paris depot part of the inventory. A distinction is made between the stock in finished items and the unfinished ones, but without any indication wether a different valuation is applied here.
In September 1904, when Émile Gallé died, the factory and the Paris depot had between them 3,629 items in stock (or being made) for a combined value of Fr. 92,900, which translates to a mean gross price of Fr. 25.6. There is no reason to suppose that this snapshot of the inventory in September is not representative, for this item’s mean value, of the whole year, for which the gross sales in glass amounted to Fr. 383,289 all outlets combined: the hypothetical number of items sold in 1904 is therefore 14,972 — not very far from the 17,700 average annual figures we got from the lot numbers between 1894-1920. Of course, on one hand it probably reflected only part of that year’s production — the preceding years’ sales were mediocre and there had to be some large inventory left — and on the other hand, Émile Gallé’s death, as he had himself predicted, boosted the sales for the always crucial end of year season.
For the purpose at hand, the meaningful figure is Fr. 25.6 per glass item — the series go from Fr. 2.3 to Fr. 120. Thankfully, these 1904 series’ values are highly consistent with the wholesale and retail prices known from other documents, like the 1912 inventory reconciliation and sales catalogues from retailers such as the Grand Dépôt or À la Paix. The December 1908 advertisement for the À la Paix specialised store pictured above is a good example of the retail prices : the 8 small and medium-sized vases chosen for this display show a price range from Fr. 7 to Fr. 70, with an average price of Fr. 44. This advertisement is particularly interesting because it features two vases among the smallest ones available at the time, which rarely appeared in such pictures, even though they represented the bulk of the serial production, as evidenced by the inventories. This implies of course that the actual mean price of a Gallé vase was much lower, because of the very high-volume sales of the smallest ones. In the 1912 inventory, which contains references to 1266 glass items from 99 different orders/designs, the average wholesale price for a vase is Fr. 32 by type, but it falls to just under Fr. 10 when the quantity is accounted for. Vases under Fr. 8 make up for an astonishing 78% of the total24. The kind of porte-violettes priced by Émile Gallé at Fr. 6 apiece for 50 copies in 1899, as we’ve seen in the very beginning of this essay, were sent to the depot in 1912 by batches of 100 to 260 at just Fr. 2.5 apiece.
This difference reflects a notable gain in productivity from the increased volume of production and a simplification of the fabrication process. This was an era of expansion : each new furnace built was a bit larger and more sophisticated and efficient than the previous one. There was also a streamlining of the blowing process : applied parts became the exception, shapes were simplified, double cameo glass rather than triple or quadruple one became the norm for the vast majority of the glass series. Quality control also fell : the pressure was such, to deliver items to the retailers, that the rate of rejection slipped. There is ample proof of that in a few preserved testimonies from disgruntled clients in the late 1900s-early 1910s as well as from the pieces from this era still found in the market today. On the other hand, fabrication also improved due to innovations in various aspects (moulds, acid etching, etc.). So, a lower rate of rejection due to a combination of improved techniques and relaxed standards also explains in part the output growth and the falling wholesale prices.
For the 1894-1920 period, the 1904 inventory mean price of Fr. 25.6 looks therefore a reasonable hypothesis, standing as a median date, given the difficulties of the 1915-1919 period, as well as an inflexion point between the creative time of Émile Gallé and the much more production oriented era of Henriette Gallé and Paul Perdrizet. It follows that with a gross revenue estimated at Fr. 12,600,000 during this whole period, the Établissements Gallé sold around 492,000 glass items. This largely confirms the figure obtained before from the lots numbers for the same 1894-1920 period, with only a 2% difference. If we add the Meisenthal glass made before 1894, it means that, by 1920, above half a million Gallé glass pieces had already been made and sold.
This global figure masks real disparities, with a steadily increasing yearly volume : between 1904 and 1914, sales tripled in value while the mean gross price of an object at the minimum stayed the same (there was a little inflation from 1911 to 1914) and in fact may have fallen quite a bit. The inescapable conclusion is that, by 1914, the factory’s yearly output was approaching 45,000 glass items, while their mean wholesale price was probably not much higher than the Fr. 9.8 value coming from the 1912 inventory.
The gross sales revenue numbers and the stock inventory from the late 1920s to early 1930s.
The picture is muddied after 1920 due to Daigueperce’s departure and the lack of any information coming from his successor in the Paris depot, Willy Mohrenwitz. Some numbers are nonetheless still available for a second crucial period, the late 1920s and early 1930s : the creation of the Établissements Gallé S. A. (Société anonyme) implied the institution of a company board receiving proper financial reports, some of which are preserved.
In July 1925, the company general inventory had 17,275 glass items in stock for a total value of Fr. 482,835, or only Fr. 28 apiece.25 If this figure seems low, it’s because it really is : had the average price of Fr. 25.6 in 1904 followed the inflation rate through the 1904-1925 period, it would have been Fr. 112 in 1925. Several internal documents mention, in fact, that prices were raised by 300% during the war alone.26 So, what happened? The productivity simply continued to increase in the 1920s. The impressive decrease in the average cost of a glass piece (when adjusted for inflation) reflects the massive increase of the Gallé factory output and/or the emphasis on producing smaller and cheaper pieces. By 1914, as we’ve seen, the average price was trending toward Fr. 10 apiece, which would translate to Fr. 35 in July 1925. The smaller series in the 1912 inventory, the various porte-violettes and galinettes had a Fr. 2.5 to 4 per item value, compared to Fr. 8 to 15 in 1925, a 220-275% increase. This is, in fact, very much in line with the 250% inflation recorded over this 1914-1925 period.27
The figure for the 1925 overall sales is unknown, but it is preserved for 1929 (Fr. 3,866,687) and 1930 (Fr. 3,396,072), as well as the stock’s value at the beginning of these two terms : these stock values show but a small increase, once they are adjusted for inflation, with Fr. 726,325 and Fr. 676,701 respectively (on March 1st) — that’s Fr. 955,000 in 1925 Francs. In both years, this stock amounts to roughly 20% in value of the glass sales.28 It follows that in 1925, the overall number of glass items sold might have reached between 68,000 and 85,000 (by the different stock/sales ratio values), and kept growing the next few years : it might have reached perhaps as many as 90,000 items in 1929 and 74,000 in 1930 (calculated from the known gross sales figures and the Fr. 28 average 1925 price adjusted for inflation, i.e., Fr. 43 in 1929 and Fr. 46 in 1930).
How can we fill the years missing any financial or stock data, 1921-1924, 1926-1928 and then 1931-1936 ? Knowing the sales numbers in 1920, 1925 (an extrapolation from the stock inventory) and 1929-1930, and assuming a continuous increase in production, for this speculative essay, it’s a simple mathematical function. The result is that total sales over the 1921-1936 period are estimated as Fr. 23,562,000, in 1925 Francs. With a Fr. 28 mean price for an item, the global glass sales amount to an estimated 840,000 pieces. This figure is significantly higher that the far rougher estimate we got from the labels numbers, but it remains in the same general range. Either way, the 1921-1936 production far surpasses the pre-1921 one, confirming F. Le Tacon’s observation that “most of the pieces we find nowadays on the market date from the 1919-1936 period”.29
It must be noted that the late 1920s up to 1928 and 1929 were banner years for the Établissements Gallé:30 the continuous depreciation of the Franc against foreign currencies doped the export market. In June 1928, the Franc was officially devalued by 4/5th from its former gold parity, a boon for the French companies reliant on exports, like the Établissements Gallé. The sales must have skyrocketed as a consequence, so much so that the Gallé direction envisioned new investments, before cautiously refraining to follow through with these projects. As Paul Perdrizet recalls in a November 1930 speech, thanking the factory’s director Émile Lang for his wisdom in the matter:31
Quand la dévalorisation du franc a paru faciliter toutes les affaires et enrichir les industriels, vous avez prudemment compris le danger des agrandissements et des précipités investissements excessifs, vous nous avez freiné.32
Sales were already quickly slowing down at this time of 1930 and the fall was precipitous in 1931. The gross profit of the crystal factory was slashed by almost 50% year-on-year. The foreign clients, who had fuelled the previous boom, were the first to default. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Gallé direction decided then to shut off the furnace and to lay off most of the workers to cut its losses. Forecasting nonetheless the continuation of the sales for some time, Paul Perdrizet ordered to increase the stock by a third before this drastic downsizing. The sales numbers are missing for these last years, but the factory, reduced to the shell of its former self, still managed to turn a total profit of Fr. 1,303,163 (the exact equivalent of one year’s salaries for the glassworkers) from the sale of this stock of glass between 1932 and 1936. The gross revenue was of course higher, but not that much with minimised production costs and this probably translates to no more than 50 to 70,000 items.
Conclusion
This will all looks too speculative to be a definite study of the matter at hand. Far too many unknowns remain, too many assumptions have to be made to reach a definite conclusion. Briefly, this is still very much research in progress, in particular when it comes to the 1920s-1930s numbers. What seems assured at this point is that the previous estimates were so cautious as to be wrong by an order of magnitude. The gross sales revenue from glass in the 1901-1914 period alone (hard data coming from official documents) implies a vastly superior production. The two different approaches explored above yield comparable results in the end, respectively 1,200,000 and 1,332,000, with a difference almost within a 10% margin of error (and much less than that for the 1894-1920 period). In fact, it would need just a bit of tweaking of a single parameter, like the average wholesale price for a glass item or the average number of items per lot, to make these estimates much closer to one another. This would not be such a stretch either because the values selected for these parameters are still debatable. But to leave them as they are underlines some uncertainty. The result is that the question mark in this essay’s title certainly looks superfluous now : there were well over a million Gallés made.
This what industrialisation looks like. What the Établissements Gallé succeeded in was the commodification of Art Nouveau art glass. Literally, everyone could have a piece of Gallé at home.
So, how is it that the industrial Gallé series were produced in such high volume and yet remain a valuable collectible today? The answer lies in what made these glass pieces still desirable at the time of their making in the first place, the seemingly endless renewal of their designs within a set of constrained parameters, the existence of high-end products still sold in luxury shops — perfumeries, jewelleries, and such.
© Samuel Provost, 18 April 2021.
Bibliography
Le Tacon F. 1998, L’œuvre de verre d’Émile Gallé, Paris, Éd. Messène.
Provost S. 2017, “La signature Gallé à l’étoile : une révision chronologique et une estimation quantitative”, Journal of Glass Studies, 39, p. 349‑365.
Footnotes
Le Tacon 1998, p. 218.
Letter from Émile Gallé to Albert Daigueperce, 17th July 1899, Archives Charpentier, private collection.
Le Tacon 1998, p. 177, and note 5, p. 234.
Very little information is available about the London depot which was set up the last and was closed shortly after Émile Gallé’s death. It’s still active in September 1904, but its stock is valued at less than a fifth of Frankfurt’s and Paris’ in the general inventory, reflecting its modest role.
An anecdotal but significant detail reflecting this importance of the Paris depot comes from the Gallé paper labels used by the factory: while the name of the company changed, the labels always had Nancy-Paris as its location.
The exact date of this closing is not known, but in a letter to Daigueperce in the late Spring of 1920, Émile Lang, the factory’s director, announces that he expects that orders in Paris will ramp up because of it : letter from Émile Lang to Albert Daigueperce, 28th May 1920 (Archives Charpentier, private collection).
In fact, the factory’s sales registers lacked many details, according to the following testimony of Émile Gallé himself. Preparing for a special retrospective display in the Paris 1900 Exposition universelle, the Exposition Centennale de l’Art français, he had to write to Daigueperce in Paris to ask him to verify in his books the references of some already sold glass pieces that he was contemplating borrowing back for the exhibition. Letter from Émile Gallé to Albert Daigueperce, 3 January 1900 (Archives Charpentier, private collection).
This is of course the archives I relied on to make a first chronological list of designs : see here.
The note is not signed but Albert Daigueperce had a very distinctive — and frankly almost illegible — handwriting. Moreover, the comparison with his signed letters to Charpentier leaves no doubt that he was indeed the author of this important note.
It does not seem to have been immediately reset though, since there are lot numbers running several thousands above 91,500, the last number used by Daigueperce. It’s possible that the reset was therefore dictated not by this change of personnel, but by another reason, perhaps because in reaching six figures the lots number was becoming too unwieldy
There is not enough time from 1896 to 1904 to consider even remotely plausible a numbering reset when Albert took the helm from his father.
This is an observation I had already made in a first attempt to use this document, to estimate the Mk II signed production : see Provost 2017.
There are however a few mentions in the Charpentier files suggesting that occasionally some earthenware work was done, or that some old stock was sold.
From 1904 to 1914, the average number of lots per year is 3,500, but this does not account for a significant growth inside the period. Before 1904, and especially before 1900, the average number had to be much closer to 2,000 lots per year.
The theoretical last lot number for December 1893 would be ca. 25,000.
There is no way at this time to know from which outlet the Frankfurt depot cannibalised part of the sales, if any.
The remark by Daigueperce that when he surrendered the Paris depot stewardship, in August 1920, there were only 110 glass items left instead of the usual 2,000 items or so, is of course a shot directed at the Gallé direction, whom he was accusing of deliberately starving the depot.
Bayeux Enchères, 2021-04-05, #215.
Thiollet 2017-06-13, #204.
Letter from Albert Daigueperce to Willy Mohrenwitz, 18 September 1920, Archives Charpentier, private collection. This letter was an apparent attempt to set the record straight on some rumours regarding the fortune he had made as a steward for Gallé.
Wood sales were higher during the second half of the war because they did not suffer from the glass production issues.
The inventory is written on an ordinary paper sheet, without any kind of indication. Even the units for the different columns are missing, although there isn’t any doubt about what the figures stand for.
For instance, the accountant during much the war, Bartel, was at first a low-level desk employee who overtook the whole responsibility before quitting in 1917 to become… an adjunct teacher in a small rural high school. Letter from Paul Perdrizet to Claude Gallé, 31 March 1917 (Family archives). These were trying circumstances, but still, this does not reflect well on the company.
But then again, it’s easier to misplace a porte-violette than a table, so this inventory reconciliation is skewed toward orders of small glass pieces.
Like in the 1904 inventory, we’ll assume this is the wholesale price.
Letter from Lucile Perdrizet to Paul Perdrizet, 2 August 1916 (Gallé family archives) ; letter from Émile Lang to Albert Daigueperce, 28 May 1920 (Charpentier archives).
For these calculations, see for instance the following online tool on the France-Inflation.com website.
It was 25% in 1904 (see above).
Le Tacon 1998, p. 177.
The 1927 catalog in the Rakow Library certainly reflects this push toward foreign markets.
Paul Perdrizet, Discours de remise de la légion d'honneur à Émile Lang, 22 November 1930, Archives Paul Perdrizet, Université de Lorraine (Nancy).
“When the devaluation of the franc seemed to facilitate all business and to enrich the industrialists, you prudently understood the danger of expansions and of precipitous excessive investments, you slowed us down.”
How to cite this article : Samuel Provost, “One Million Gallés? A tentative assessment of the Cristallerie Gallé's quantitative output from 1894 to 1936”, Newsletter on Art Nouveau Craftwork & Industry, no 9, 18 April 2021 [link].