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Dutch company of art dealers and interior design and furniture workshop. The Arts and Crafts interior design and furniture workshop was set up in The Hague in 1893. The Art Nouveau character of the furniture produced by the workshop set it very much apart from its competitors. Designs were produced by the artist Johan Thorn Prikker and the architect Chris Wegerif (1859–1920). During the early years of the workshop the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde exercised a strong influence on its designs. After 1900 the designs became more austere, any Art Nouveau character being confined to woodwork and batik upholstery fabrics. In order to ensure the unity of each interior, an effort was made to have all the objects designed by the same artist. The workshop fostered a close relationship with The Hague school of painting.

(b Villefranche, Rhône, 1872; d Paris, 1909).

French designer and lithographer. He began his training in Villefranche, where he studied painting, and in 1893 he moved to Paris, entering the Ecole Normale d’Enseignement du Dessin. There he became a pupil and disciple of Eugène-Samuel Grasset, the Professor of Decorative Arts, and was also influenced by Luc Olivier Merson. Berthon’s main output consisted of posters and decorative panels. However, he also produced bookbindings and furniture designs, both of which he exhibited at the Salon in 1895; designs for ceramics for Villeroy & Boch in the late 1890s; and a few designs for the covers of such magazines as L’Image (July 1897) and Poster (May 1899). His work is in an Art Nouveau style, and he adopted that movement’s plant and figural motifs, especially the motif of the femme fatale, and also its long sinuous lines. These features can be seen in such works as the poster ...

(b Ath, Jan 7, 1875; d Brussels, Sept 1, 1952).

Belgian decorative artist, architect and painter. He began architectural studies at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp but broke off to pursue courses on the decorative arts at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, graduating in 1898. The tuition he received there from the painter Constant Montald gave him a taste for mural art and he soon developed a business that specialized in sgraffito painting, a technique that had recently come back into fashion. He completed some 440 design projects, most of which were for building façades and stairways. As an interior designer, painter and draughtsman, Cauchie was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow style and he produced a variety of work in the applied arts. Towards 1905 his style became more geometrical. It was at this time that he built his own studio and house at Etterbeek, Brussels, in collaboration with the architect ...

[Klönne, Eduard; Colonna, Eugène]

(b Mülheim, nr Cologne, May 27, 1862; d Nice, Oct 14, 1948).

German architect and designer. He studied architecture from 1877 to 1881 in Brussels and in 1882 went to New York where he worked briefly as a designer for Tiffany’s Associated Artists. From 1884 to 1885 he worked with the New York architects Bruce Price. From 1885 onwards he produced railway wagons for Barney & Smith, Dayton, OH, and for a Canadian railway company, and he also worked in the field of interior decoration. In 1893 Colonna went to Europe, settling in Paris, where in 1898 he started work as a designer for S. Bing’s Galerie Art Nouveau. His heyday came between 1898 and 1902, when he produced designs for jewellery, textiles and furniture, including exhibits in the famous Art Nouveau Bing pavilion (destr.) at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.

In 1902 Colonna returned to Canada, and for 20 years he worked as an interior decorator and designer there and in the USA. In ...

(b Liverpool, Aug 15, 1845; d Horsham, W. Sussex, March 14, 1915).

English painter, illustrator, designer, writer and teacher. He showed artistic inclinations as a boy and was encouraged to draw by his father, the portrait painter and miniaturist Thomas Crane (1808–59). A series of illustrations to Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott (Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Houghton Lib.) was shown first to Ruskin, who praised the use of colour, and then to the engraver William James Linton, to whom Crane was apprenticed in 1859. From 1859 to 1862 Crane learnt a technique of exact and economical draughtsmanship on woodblocks. His early illustrative works included vignette wood-engravings for John R. Capel Wise’s The New Forest: Its History and its Scenery (1862).

During the mid-1860s Crane evolved his own style of children’s book illustration. These so-called ‘toy books’, printed in colour by Edmund Evans, included The History of Jenny Wren and The Fairy Ship. Crane introduced new levels of artistic sophistication to the art of illustration: after ...

Furniture workshop established in Amsterdam in 1902 by Willem Penaat, Jan Eisenlöffel and the architect H. W. Mol. All three had left Binnenhuis, ’t to set up a venture that would produce good, affordable, mass-produced furniture based on the rationalist design principles of the Nieuwe Kunst style. Penaat concentrated on developing simple, aesthetic basic models for each type of furniture by improving traditional homemade furniture. Around 1908 a more decorative style was introduced that made use of more hardwoods and ornament. The ‘improved’ country chair was particularly successful, but the disadvantage was that Penaat’s designs were copied and sold as cheaper versions. This led Penaat to trademark the models, one of his many organizational initiatives. In 1916 the workshop was taken over and renamed Nusink & Co., and it later ceased trading.

(b 1876; d 1955).

French designer of furniture, glass, metal, ceramics and interiors. He was a pioneering exponent of Art Deco and a detractor of Art Nouveau, which in practice meant that he aspired to a style that was neither historical nor mannered. Dufrène was a founder-member in 1901 of the Société des Artistes-Décorateurs (SAD). He inaugurated a range of furniture in very dark native wood and defended functionalism and the use of mechanical processes and mass production. In ...

(b Frankenstein nr Breslau [now Wroclaw], Dec 15, 1868; d Munich, 1940).

German painter, illustrator and interior designer. He studied at the Kunstschule in Breslau under the German painter Albrecht Bräuer (1830–97), and later at the Pinakothek in Munich, absorbing the work of the Old Masters. He continued his training in Paris at the Académie Julian (1892–4), and established a studio in Munich (1895). With other non-academic painters of the period he rejected the influence of the French Impressionists and allied with the Symbolist painters of the late 19th century. He drew inspiration from wild places and as a young man travelled to the Baltic Sea and to the Riviera and Brittany coasts. He was fascinated by Norse legends, Grimms’ fairy tales and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Stimmen der Völker, all of which had an impact on his subject-matter. His early paintings of bucolic landscapes with figures were executed in flat, calm colours with well-defined outlines, reminiscent of the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. In a long, prolific career he designed costumes and stage sets, stained glass, ceramics and bookbindings....

[Sluijters, Georges Joseph van; Feuren, Georges van]

(b Paris, Sept 6, 1868; d Paris, Nov 26, 1928).

French designer and painter. Son of a Dutch architect and a Belgian mother, he started out as an actor, costumier and then interior decorator in Paris. In 1894 at the Galerie des Artistes Modernes he exhibited watercolours and paintings of a moderate Symbolist style, typically depicting women in a manner reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley’s work. Capturing the essence of the feminine spirit became his trademark. With Eugène Gaillard and Edouard Colonna he was selected by Siegfried Bing, founder of the Galeries de l’Art Nouveau, to design rooms for his Pavilion Bing at the Exposition Universelle, Paris (1900). De Feure’s carpets, glassware and furniture designs for the boudoir and toilette were based on the theme of woman, emphasizing delicate lines and elegant sensuality. He later left Bing’s gallery and, as an independent designer, created vide-poche furniture, which contained hidden marquetry compartments. This furniture suggested notions of secrecy and coquetry, themes that de Feure pursued throughout his career....

(b Paris, July 17, 1877; d Sainte-Maxime, nr St Tropez, 1941).

French designer. He was a leading designer of furniture and interiors in the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco before World War I and in the subsequent popularization of the Art Deco style. He was a pupil of Eugène-Samuel Grasset in Paris, and his earliest designs, in the Gothic style, were published in Art et Décoration, the journal of design reform founded in 1887. From 1899 Follot was designing bronzes, jewellery and textiles for La Maison Moderne, the commercial outlet for Art Nouveau objects, and his interior design for a study, shown in 1904 at the first Salon of the Société des Artistes-Décorateurs, of which he was a founder-member, demonstrated his affinity with the prevailing curvilinear characteristics of Art Nouveau. Follot’s design for a study shown at the same Salon in 1909 revealed a change towards simpler, more rectilinear forms inspired by the revival of Neo-classicism, which became characteristic of his style. He employed light woods, ornamented with carved and gilded fruits, garlands and cornucopias (e.g. chair, ...

(b 1862; d 1933).

French designer. He was a barrister by profession, and his legal training is perhaps reflected in his furniture designs, which are solid in construction, each part being carefully conceived to relate to the whole. He published his theories about avant-garde furniture and became established as an advocate of the modern school. Although known almost exclusively for his furniture, he also designed a wide range of objects and decorative schemes in an elegant Art Nouveau style.

Early in his career Gaillard collaborated in S. Bing’s fashionable Art Nouveau shop in Paris. Together with Georges de Feure and Edouard Colonna he created interiors and furniture for Bing’s pavilion, Art Nouveau Bing (destr.), at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. Under Bing’s direction these artists carried out an aesthetic programme that laid claim to ‘the old French tradition’ infused with ‘a lively spirit of modernity’. Gaillard was responsible for three rooms in the pavilion: the vestibule, dining-room and bedroom. French precedents, especially elements from the Rococo style, were freely used as a source of inspiration. In the vestibule Gaillard installed a mosaic floor, bold pink draperies and a stencilled frieze that effectively set off a walnut portemanteau with mirrored back and shelves. The dining-room was furnished in walnut, ornamented with scrolled foliage and panelled wainscot, beneath a mural painted by the Spanish artist ...

(Charles Martin)

(b Nancy, May 4, 1846; d Nancy, Sept 23, 1904).

French glassmaker, potter and cabinetmaker. He was the son of Charles Gallé-Reinemer, a manufacturer of ceramics and glass in Nancy, and as early as 1865 he started working for his father, designing floral decoration. From 1862 to 1866 he studied philosophy, botany and mineralogy in Weimar, and from 1866–7 he was employed by the Burgun, Schwerer & Cie glassworks in Meisenthal. On his return to Nancy he worked in his father’s workshops at Saint-Clément designing faience tableware. In 1871 he travelled to London to represent the family firm at the International Exhibition. During his stay he visited the decorative arts collections at the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), familiarizing himself with Chinese, Japanese and Islamic styles. He was particularly impressed with the Islamic enamelled ware, which influenced his early work. In 1874, after his father’s retirement, he established his own small glass workshop in Nancy and assumed the management of the family business....

Term denoting the style of works of art produced in Glasgow from c. 1890 to c. 1920 and particularly associated with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Herbert MacNair and the Macdonald family sisters, Frances and Margaret. The style originated at the Glasgow School of Art, where Francis H. Newbery (1853–1946) became director in 1885. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, Newbery had a commitment to excellence in art that combined functionalism with beauty while encouraging individuality and experimentation among his students. Within three years he had brought in the Century Guild of Artists’ chief metalworker, William Kellock Brown (1856–1934), to teach modelling and metalwork at the School. Kellock Brown had an intimate understanding of A. H. Mackmurdo’s approach to art, as articulated in the journal The Hobby Horse (launched in spring 1884), which voiced a desire for the unification of the old with the new and for an artistic relationship between abstract lines and masses that would reflect the harmonious whole found in nature. The development of the style was given further impetus by the fact that ...

(b Lyon, 1867; d New York, May 20, 1942).

French architect, furniture designer and writer. After attending the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, in 1885 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; he left four years later without a diploma, however, to work for a builder as both architect and site craftsman. The influence of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc is evident in his early works, particularly the Ecole du Sacré-Coeur (1895), in which the exposed cast-iron structure of V-shaped columns is an adaptation of a drawing taken from Viollet-le-Duc’s Entretiens sur l’architecture (1863–72). These early commissions, built in a picturesque and eclectic manner, culminated in the Castel Béranger block of flats, Paris, where his first use of the Art Nouveau style appeared in its decorative elements. He visited Brussels in 1895, where he met Victor Horta, whose Maison du Peuple was then under construction. After seeing Horta’s work Guimard made changes to the original neo-Gothic decorative elements of the Castel Béranger, introducing a colourful mixture of facing materials and organically derived embellishments, based on his belief that decoration is the more effective for being non-representational. Between ...

(b Brussels, April 7, 1877; d Brussels, Feb 22, 1956).

Belgian interior designer and architect. He was the son of the painter Adolphe Hamesse (1849–1925) and studied architecture at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He then worked successively in the offices of Paul Hankar and Alban Chambon. With the latter he found his true vocation in interior design using numerous ornamental components, manufactured industrially, which he excelled at combining in Art Nouveau compositions. Assisted by his two brothers, the painters Georges Hamesse (b 1874) and Léon Hamesse (b 1883), he responded to the eclectic tastes of the period by exploiting a very broad range of styles in such commissions as the Cohn-Donnay house (1904), the Ameke department store (1905), a masonic lodge (1909) and the Théâtre des Variétés (1909), all in Brussels. He also worked on a number of cinemas in Brussels, including the Artistic Palace (...

(b Brussels, Jan 7, 1854; d Brussels, March 6, 1936).

Belgian architect and designer. He was the son of a joiner and cabinetmaker and began his career as an interior and furniture designer. His lack of academic training allowed him to join up quickly with the precursors of the Art Nouveau style. In 1895 he exhibited several chairs at the second Salon de la Libre Esthétique; this work followed by the design of a shop in Rue Montagne de la Cour, placed him among the main protagonists of the new style in Brussels. Together with Paul Hankar, Henry Van de Velde and Gustave Serrurier-Bovy, Hobé was commissioned to design the Exposition Congolaise at Tervuren, part of the Exposition Internationale (1897), which became an expression of Belgian Art Nouveau at its peak. During this period, he also undertook a trip abroad and studied traditional cottages in southern England. Their architecture and interiors became his chief source of inspiration, and he built numerous houses in this style in the main holiday resorts of Belgium. The interiors he showed at the Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Decorativa in Turin (...

(b 1883; d 1935).

Basque–French cartoonist, interior decorator and designer, notably of furniture but also of wallpaper, textiles and jewellery. His early work is in an Art Nouveau idiom, but he gradually became a pioneering exponent of Art Deco. Pierre(-Emile) Legrain was initially his employee and later his collaborator. In 1914 Inbe moved to America, where he worked as a set designer, and in ...

[Christiaan]

(b Amsterdam, May 26, 1878; d Dachau, April 2, 1945).

Dutch painter, designer and applied artist. He trained in design and decorative painting at the Quellinus school and the Rijksschool voor Kunstnijverheid (National School of the Applied Arts) in Amsterdam from 1892 to 1899. He was assigned to assist with the decoration of the Dutch pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. A number of his designs for the pavilion were executed in batik, a Javanese technique that had been recently introduced in the Netherlands. In subsequent years Lebeau developed a very personal approach to batiking and within a short time became the leading Dutch artist in this field. His batiked screens in particular were widely acclaimed (examples in Assen, Prov. Mus. Drenthe) and are considered masterpieces of Dutch Jugendstil.

Lebeau is one of the most important representatives of the severe, geometrical trend in Dutch applied arts of the early 20th century. From 1903 he designed damask tablecloths and household linen for the ...

(b Glasgow, June 7, 1868; d London, Dec 10, 1928).

Scottish architect, designer and painter. In the pantheon of heroes of the Modern Movement, he has been elevated to a cult figure, such that the importance of his late 19th-century background and training in Glasgow are often overlooked. He studied during a period of great artistic activity in the city that produced the distinctive Glasgow style. As a follower of A. W. N. Pugin and John Ruskin, he believed in the superiority of Gothic over Classical architecture and by implication that moral integrity in architecture could be achieved only through revealed construction. Although Mackintosh’s buildings refrain from overt classicism, they reflect its inherent discipline. His profound originality was evident by 1895, when he began the designs for the Glasgow School of Art. His decorative schemes, particularly the furniture, also formed an essential element in his buildings. During Mackintosh’s lifetime his influence was chiefly felt in Austria, in the work of such painters as Gustav Klimt and such architects as Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich. The revival of interest in his work was initiated by the publication of monographs by Pevsner (...

(b Glasgow, 1868; d Innellan, Strathclyde, 1955).

Scottish designer and teacher. Having trained as an architect alongside Charles Rennie Mackintosh, he attended evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art between 1888 and 1894. After meeting the Macdonald family sisters (marrying Frances Macdonald in 1899) he began collaborating with them and Mackintosh (his future brother-in-law) on a number of designs which earned them the nickname ‘the Spook School’. Much of his early work, including furniture, book illustrations and watercolours, was inspired by Celtic and medieval imagery. He later set up his own studio, but an extensive workshop fire destroyed many of his designs; however, a number of these were reproduced in The Studio magazine.

In 1898 MacNair accepted a teaching post, in design, at University College, Liverpool, and thus avoided the likelihood of any competition with Mackintosh. While in Liverpool he continued to receive a number of small, private commissions through friends and colleagues. His newly decorated home in Liverpool was featured in ...