A botanist by training and soul of the movement of the School of Nancy, Émile Gallé finds his greatest sources of inspiration in nature and in particular in the flora of Lorraine.
Émile Gallé was born in Nancy on May 4, 1846. After a period of apprenticeship in various European cities including Weimar and Meisenthal, he joined his father’s earthenware and glassware trading and decoration business in 1867. Ten years later, in 1877, Émile Gallé took over the family business and extended its activities to cabinetmaking in 1885. Already noticed at the Earth and Glass Exhibition in 1884, Émile Gallé was dedicated to the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1889 with three awards for his ceramics, glassware and furniture, including a Grand Prix for his glassware. On this occasion, Gallé was made an officer of the Legion of Honor.
From this date, Gallé intensely developed his technical and aesthetic research on glass work. He develops and creates new manufacturing processes. His glassworks were designed in Meisenthal until 1894. He opened a crystal factory whose firing took place on May 29, 1894 in his company in Nancy. His research resulted in the filing of two patents in 1898, for “a kind of decoration and patina on crystal” and “a kind of glass and crystal marquetry”.
His work, with multiple references, expresses the diversity of Émile Gallé’s interests. Nature plays a dominant, but not exclusive role. An artist as well as a botanist, Gallé was elected secretary of the Société Centrale d’Horticulture de Nancy in 1877. A Dreyfusard from the start, he dedicated numerous talking glasses to the cause of Captain Dreyfus, which included a quotation engraved on the glass, such as the Black Men vase, the Le Figuier chalice.
Committed very early to the renewal of the decorative arts, Émile Gallé distributed, in its French but also English and German depots, quality series pieces, thanks to the industrialization of its production. In 1901, he was the founder and the first president of the Ecole de Nancy, “Alliance Provinciale des Industries d’Art”, whose statutes he wrote. When Émile Gallé died in 1904, his widow Henriette Gallé, assisted by her son-in-law Paul Perdrizet (1870-1938), took over the artistic and industrial activity of glassmaking. In 1908, she published the Écrits pour l’art, which brought together Gallé’s main writings on botany and floriculture, as well as all of her exhibition notices, her speeches, including the Symbolic Decor, delivered upon Gallé’s admission at the Stanislas Academy in 1900 and several articles on art and artists. The société anonyme des Établissements Gallé, thus transformed in 1927, ceased its glass production in 1931.
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