René Lalique: From the Jeweled Dragonfly to Molded Glass

In the spring of 1900, visitors to the Exposition Universelle in Paris came upon a display of something that did not resemble jewelry at all. There were combs of translucent horn, pendants in which a woman's face emerged from a cloud of enamel, and brooches whose insect wings let the light pass straight through. The man responsible, René Lalique, was then forty, and by the close of the fair he was the jeweler everyone in Paris was discussing. He had arrived there by an unhurried road.

René Lalique: from Aÿ to Paris

Lalique was born on 6 April 1860 in Aÿ, a village of the Marne better known for its champagne than for its goldsmiths. His family moved to Paris while he was still a small child, and by his early teens he was drawing with unusual assurance. In 1876, at sixteen, he was apprenticed to Louis Aucoc, one of the established jewelers of the capital. He also attended evening classes at the École des Arts Décoratifs, and then spent two years in England at the Crystal Palace School of Art in Sydenham — years that gave him a grounding in drawing and design which his later work never abandoned.

Returning to Paris, he worked as a freelance designer for the grand houses, among them Cartier and Boucheron, supplying drawings that other hands would execute in the prevailing manner of diamond-set flowers and stars. The mid-1880s brought independence: he took over the workshop of the jeweler Jules Destape, and by 1890 had a shop of his own. Gradually his clients began to ask for the pieces that looked least like those of his competitors, and he understood that this was his opening.

Horn, glass and enamel: the new vocabulary of Art Nouveau jewelry

The convention of the age held that value resided in the stone. A jewel was a setting for diamonds, and the more diamonds, the more serious the jewel. Lalique reversed the proposition. He treated the design as the substance and let the materials serve it, choosing whatever best suited the image — gold, certainly, but also horn, ivory, semi-precious stones, molded glass, and enamel in every depth of translucence. Diamonds remained, though in small quantities, and as accents rather than as the argument. His contemporary Émile Gallé is reported to have called him the inventor of modern jewelry, and the phrase has stuck for good reason.

Horn is the clearest instance. Worked thin and warmed into shape, it takes on the pale, faintly smoky quality of a petal or a wing. The comb illustrated here, made around 1900, turns a spray of lily of the valley into a single gesture: the leaf is horn, the bells are enameled gold, and the whole curves like a stem bent by wind. Cleveland's curators record that it was bought from Lalique after the 1900 Exposition by a Cleveland collector, probably for his wife.

All of this belongs to a wider movement, and readers who wish to place Lalique within it will find the broader story in our essay on Art Nouveau jewelry. What distinguishes him within that company is discipline. The curving line is never decorative for its own sake; the dragonfly's abdomen, the curl of a wave, the arch of a cheek are each observed before they are stylized.

Plique-à-jour enamel and the light behind it

No technique is more closely tied to his name than plique-à-jour. In ordinary enameling, the glassy color is fused onto a metal ground. In plique-à-jour the cells of a gold framework are filled with enamel but left without a backing, so that the finished panel behaves like a miniature stained-glass window. It is exacting and unforgiving work, since the unsupported enamel is vulnerable in the firing. Lalique and his workshop mastered it, and used it with rare freedom, for wings, for leaves and for the drift of a veil.

The dragonfly brooch shown at the head of this article, in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, gives a sense of the result. Two insects face a central cabochon; their wings are panels of translucent green and blue enamel, ruled by fine gold veining, and the surrounding gold is worked into a loose knot. The museum dates it to about 1900 to 1910 and records gold with plique-à-jour and cloisonné enamels. We recommend our own account of plique-à-jour enamel for those who want the technique explained in detail, and, as a useful contrast, the opaque, machine-turned surfaces discussed in guilloché enamel, a different kind of brilliance altogether.

The dragonfly woman and the Paris of Bernhardt and Gulbenkian

The most celebrated of all his creations is the corsage ornament known as the Dragonfly Woman, made in the late 1890s and today in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. A woman's torso rises from the body of an insect; her arms are lifted among wings of plique-à-jour; the claws at the base are those of a bird of prey. It is not a piece one imagines worn to dinner; it reads as a work made to be looked at. It unsettles a modern viewer as readily as it must have unsettled a contemporary one, which seems to suit it. The hybrid female form, half human and half creature of the air and water, is the constant of his Art Nouveau work, and it reaches its most memorable statement here.

His reputation in the 1890s rested on two kinds of patron. The first was the theater. The actress Sarah Bernhardt wore stage jewelry of his design in the middle of that decade, and a silver medal he engraved with her profile was given to her guests in 1896. The second was the collector. Calouste Gulbenkian, the Armenian-born oil financier, acquired the Dragonfly Woman directly from Lalique, in 1903 by most accounts, and over nearly three decades commissioned well over one hundred and forty works from him. A story is often repeated that Bernhardt made the introduction between the two; it is plausible, and it is certainly the kind of story Paris liked, but we offer it as legend rather than as record.

The Gulbenkian relationship is instructive. Here was a client who understood that what he commissioned would survive in a museum rather than in a jewel case, and Lalique, in turn, seems to have felt free to make objects that were ambitious rather than merely wearable. The Gulbenkian collection is now housed in Lisbon, where much of it can still be seen.

The Exposition Universelle of 1900 is customarily seen as the summit of his career as a jeweler. His display brought together the horn combs, the enamel pendants and the pieces in which gold dissolved into foliage, and it won him the admiration of critics and the custom of collectors, among them the Cleveland patron mentioned above. After the fair, the question was no longer whether this jewelry was legitimate, but how many imitators it would produce.

Those imitators are, incidentally, part of why the field rewards careful looking today. Lalique's own pieces are often marked, but many of his contemporaries worked in the same idiom, and the discerning collector learns to tell the master's line from the competent derivative. The distinction rarely shows in the subject. It shows in the confidence of the drawing and in the quality of the enamel work.

Lalique glass: a second career

By about 1910 Lalique had begun to turn from jewelry to glass. The reasons are partly practical. Jewelry in his manner was costly to make and limited in its public, while molded glass could be produced in numbers and carried the same sensibility into the home. He had already tried glass in his jewelry and had experimented with perfume bottles; from about 1907 he worked with the perfumer François Coty, and the commission is widely credited with showing him what could be done with industrial production. A glassworks at Combs-la-Ville followed, and after the First World War he established a larger factory at Wingen-sur-Moder in Alsace. His final exhibition of jewelry is recorded as 1912.

The Cleveland vase illustrated below, dated 1909 to 1912, belongs to this transition. Frogs, applied in green and dark glass, settle among the pads of a pond, in the swampy, observant spirit of the early Art Nouveau; it is closer to his jewelry than to the Art Deco bowls and vases that would follow. In the 1920s those would become the signature of the house, from car mascots to the fountain he produced for the 1925 Paris exhibition, and later to glass for the ocean liner Normandie.

Few designers have moved so completely from one art to another without losing their identity. The vocabulary survived the change of material: the insect, the wave, the female figure, the seed pod. Only the scale changed, and the audience with it.

What René Lalique left behind

He died in Paris in the spring of 1945, aged eighty-five, and is buried at Père Lachaise. The glass house he founded continued under his son Marc and still bears his name. Yet it is the jewelry that continues to teach. It established that a jeweled object could be judged by its imagination and craft as much as by its carats, a notion that shaped the studio jewelers of the twentieth century and every designer since who has preferred a strange, beautiful material to a conventional one.

The influence is easy to underestimate, because it has been absorbed so thoroughly. A fan of pierced mother-of-pearl, such as the c. 1900 example in Cleveland, applies the same principle on a gentler scale: butterflies and flowers cut from a luminous natural material, picked out in gold. Nothing about it declares its cost, and everything about it declares its author's attention.

For those who collect period jewelry, Lalique offers a useful measure. The great pieces are not those with the largest stones; they are those in which a clear idea has been carried through every detail, from the first drawing to the last hinge. It is a standard worth bringing to any piece from the period, whether Art Nouveau, Edwardian or later, and we try to hold ourselves to it in everything we offer.

Readers who would like to see how that spirit lives on in the decades after Lalique are welcome to explore our collection of vintage brooches, where enamel, natural motif and fine craftsmanship recur across several eras. If a particular piece interests you, you are welcome to request a private viewing, and we will share what we know of its history in person.