Charles Martin Emile Gallé was born into a family that operated a business producing and selling luxury glassware and ceramics. Based in Nancy, Emile’s father, Charles Gallé (1818–1902), ran a studio for applying the finishing decorative touches to blanks that were outsourced to manufacturers elsewhere. As of 1854, Charles Gallé was supplying tableware to several of the palaces of Napoleon III; in 1866, he was given the prestigious appointment of purveyor to the court of Napoleon III. Rooted in European historicism, his glassware and ceramics were decorated with arrangements of flowers and ribbons in a style that highlighted the beauty of their materials. In around 1864, Emile Gallé was apprenticed to his father and started to produce designs for ceramics. A sense of aesthetic rooted in his native France lay at the heart of the design style that Gallé developed. Later in life, he reflected that he had expanded on the traditions of his father by shaping and decorating glass and ceramics.

When France declared war on Prussia on July 19, 1870, setting off the Franco-Prussian War, the twenty-four-year-old Gallé enlisted with the volunteer army. On May 10, 1871, the conflict came to an end with the defeat of France and the annexation of a part of Galle’s native Alsace-Lorraine region by Germany under the terms of the Treaty of Frankfurt. The Meisenthal factory, one of the factories that had manufactured glassware for the Gallé family business, was now on German territory. That was the place where Emile Gallé had first learnt and honed theart of glassmaking (1866–1867). It is likely that the seeds of his strong love of France were sown in this postwar period. True to his convictions, he incorporated the Cross of Lorraine and the thistle on the coat of arms for Nancy in his designs. That strong attachment to the traditions of his native country is at the root of the distinctive style Gallé established.

The influences of Islamic, Chinese, Japanese, and other foreign works of art appear everywhere in Gallé’s production. The period from the late 1850s, when the family business began to prosper, to around 1900 coincided with the age of the international expositions. These World’s Fairs were extremely important opportunities to develop the family business by making the most of an international event where countries from around the world promoted the products of their own cultures. Gallé also enjoyed the exposure to foreign cultures and the opportunity to see vast numbers of exhibits with his own eyes. At the time of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1867, Gallé stayed in Paris for six months to represent his father. The 1867 Expo is famous for launching Japonisme in Europe and the United States, and the twenty-one-year-old Gallé was greatly impressed by the displays of approximately 1,970 art and crafts objects from Japan. Since the Japanese pavilion stood between the Persian and Egyptian pavilions, it is highly likely that he visited them as well. At the time of the 1871 World’s Fair in England, Gallé spent half a year in London, where he visited the South Kensington Museum (currently, the Victoria and Albert Museum) to make careful studies of its famous collection of Asian and Oriental objects.

In April 1885, Gallé spent two weeks in Berlin to research its collection of Chinese overlaid glass at the Kunstgewerbemuseum. Many of the pieces that Gallé displayed at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889 were inspired by Chinese gemstones and glass. In his commentary on the works presented to the judges at the expo, Gallé clearly explains how the pieces were made and how he imitated jades. This exhibition includes about ten objects in the Chinese and Japanese styles from Gallé’s personal collection, which came up for auction last year. The exotic styles he observed in works from other lands, different from French traditions, emerged changed and reborn after they had been filtered through Gallé’s vision.

The motifs that Gallé used for his work are rich in plant life with forty or so out of ninety-four creative works relating to botany, horticulture, or floriculture.Gallé was not only an artist; he was also a botanist who supported the idea of mutations in plant life from an early stage.

Gallé inherited his profound interest in botany from his mother, Fanny Gallé-Reinemer (1825–1891), who loved the countryside and forests above all else. As a child, Gallé was tutored at home and is said to have read Les Fleurs animées (The flowers personified) by J.J. Grandville (1803–1847), the Symbolist artist from Nancy. By age fourteen he would go with his friends to collect plants. He also was acquainted with the celebrated botanist Dominique-Alexandre Godron (1807–1880) and would provide Professor Godron with careful observations as he gradually immersed himself in botany. In 1877, he was a founding member of the Société Centrale d’Horticulture de Nancy (and appointed vice chair in 1891). The following year, he joined the Société Nationale d’Horticulture de France, and in 1880, he was appointed to the board of the Botanical Garden in Nancy as the successor to Professor Godron. A well-known botanist, Gallé cultivated more than two thousand species of plants, including species indigenous to Lorraine, North American trees, and shrubs brought from Japan, in a garden covering more than one hectare at his home. Gallé literally rubbed shoulders with the inspiration for his work.

At this exhibition, we display production draft sketches and drawings created according to Gallé’s instructions as well as the actual finished pieces. The drawings are not simply illustrations for designs; they possess a realism that elevates them to natural history miniatures or botanical art. Gallé’s love for botanical research is given form in his glass, ceramics, and furniture, but to be able to do create those works, he also had to possess the technical skills of an artist who tirelessly seeks out material.

“Our roots are in the depths of the woods.” (Ma racine est au fond des bois.)

This quote from the Dutch physiologist Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893) hung over the door to Gallé’s workshop. It is an allegory that voices the sentiments of Gallé who loved insects, birds, and animals as much as he loved plant life. Similarly to the case of plants, the sketches that Gallé drew during the production process tell us that he explored all his chosen natural motifs from a physiological perspective. At the second public lecture for the Ecole de Nancy on April 28, 1901, Gallé said that any manufacturer who wants to create decorative objects that respond to modern natural science must have a fundamental knowledge of physiology. Marine life was another important element that brought out the creativity in Gallé. In a lecture about “decorating symbolically” given on August 17, 1900, Gallé spoke about how the secrets of the ocean explained by oceanographers revealed treasure chests of ornaments, providing artists with astonishing material.

At a time when there was no television or Internet, the sources of information that Gallé consulted included the writings and illustrations in specialized books in the family library and in Le Magasin Pittoresque, a natural history magazine (first published in 1833) that the family had subscribed to since his father’s time. Another source was Kunstformen der Natur by Ernst Haeckel, published from 1899 to 1904 in eleven volumes, which featured delicate miniatures of orchids, cedar trees, frogs, moths, bats, jellyfish, and other plants, insects, and marine life, all the way up to the invertebrates. Clearly this book was an important source of inspiration for Gallé’s work.

Gallé did not, however, simply reproduce motifs from natural history. Rather, the motifs were a way of communicating emotion. In his mind, the role of Gallé, the artist, was to give color and shape to true feelings symbolized by nature.

As a student, Gallé won many awards for his work in the liberal arts including the French language, Latin, Greek, German, philosophy, and rhetoric. Gallé’s works express both the mythical and the biblical worlds. Especially in the 1880s he also he started to inscribe his pieces with favorite lines of poetry by his contemporaries or authors of earlier generations, eloquently describing fantastical worlds. Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Pierre Dupont, Maurice Maeterlinck, Robert de Montesquieu, Paul Verlaine—too numerous to count, these are only some of the writers that caught Gallé’s ear. With these pieces, which he called Verrerie parlante (speaking glass), Gallé established a reputation for profound Symbolism.

I maintain, in fact, taunted or not, my way to apply—such as the artists of the Middle Ages, who built on faith and on ideas—to apply, I say, texts for my vases and initiate my buyers through paperwork. Why deny to the decorator the libretto, which has unquestionably inspired the composer of the music.

This quote reiterates what Gallé said about adding lines of poetry to his work when he commented on the importance of creating pieces that resonate with people in an art magazine in 1898. Of course, the poems did not explain his pieces. Rather, Gallé imbued his poetic and fantastical shapes with beautiful melodies.

The revolution has been achieved. These are neither Murano nor Bohemian glass. While tuned to the highest of sounds, these are not fragments of glass trembling under claws or glittering diamond grains. He seeks neither the transparency that was the ultimate objective of glass craftsmen in the past nor the cut-glass decorativeness that was the glory of glass craftsmen only yesterday. Glass is not a transparent substance like window glass nor a reflective material as in mirrors. It speaks. It is a poem in colors at times heavy, gentle, joyful.

These are the words of a critic praising Gallé’s glass at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Gallé expressed himself symbolically, using words to give tone to the realms of color and shape, superimposing his own emotions on observations of the natural world, his love for France, and other lands. As we have already seen, Gallé turned his inquisitive gaze on many things, capturing what he needed to express his own mind, but, naturally, he also had to continue to develop the techniques that made expression possible. In particular, he no longer found it possible to use the beautiful but unstable medium of transparent glass to express his messages. In 1898, looking ahead to the Paris Expo two years later, Gallé took out patents for two techniques. One of them was patiné(patination), a technique for the devitrification of transparent glass.

Gallé went far beyond the potential of his material to reach the domain of sculpture, yet, his work still possessed a measure of utility. We hope you will enjoy the ultimate Gallé in this epilogue to the exhibition.