Emile Gallé: Dreams Into Glass
Dragonfly Bowl, blown, with applied engraved dragonflies. Emile Gallé, Nancy, France, 1903. H: 19 cm.
Among art historians and collectors, the name Emile Gallé (1846-1904) evokes images of incredible shapes, color, and themes. Emile lived in France during an age of technological, scientific, and political explosion. In the United States, Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb in 1879, Alexander Graham Bell spoke on his telephone in 1876, Henry Ford built his first automobile in 1893, Orville and Wilber Wright made the first airplane flight in 1903, and, in France, Louis Pasteur developed a vaccine for rabies in 1885.
Almost a century before today's Studio Glass artists began to understand the potential that glass offered, Gallé's imagination and constant adoption of new techniques transformed glass making into a form unequaled to this day. Gallé believed that his glass vessels should be more than functional containers. Nature was his source of beauty and inspiration. Each bowl, vase, or ewer was inspired in its design by nature balances of light/dark, birth/death, growth/decay, by the violent political ferment of his time, and with the genius to seize the accidental and use it. Upon examination, Gallé's glass vessels contain blazes of color, constellations of air bubbles, shimmering flecks of imbedded metal foils, and often, entrapped figures of insects that seem to float in a haze.
"My own work consists above all in the execution of personal dreams: to dress crystal in tender and terrible roles to compose for it the thoughtful faces of pleasure or tragedy...to impose upon it qualities I should like to have in order to incarnate my dream and design...
I have sought to make crystal yield forth all the tender or fierce expression I can summon when guided by a hand that delights in it." -Emile Gallé, Ecrits pour L'Art 1884-1889
An example of collaboration between the scientist and the artist:
Naturally occurring changes to glass surfaces, such as crizzling, iridescence, chemical migration (creating surface color changes), have been artificially duplicated by chemists for artist's decorative effects.
(See: Studio Glass; Crizzling)