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French family of glassmakers. In 1878 Jean Daum (b Bischwiller, 1825; d Nancy, 1885), from Alsace, acquired a glass factory, which he renamed Verrerie de Nancy, and there began to produce traditional tableware. His eldest son, Auguste Daum (1853–1909), joined the factory in 1879 and was followed by Antonin Daum (1864–1930), who managed the business from 1887. To save the company from financial ruin, the brothers enlarged the range of coloured glassware in the 1890s, producing etched, moulded and cameo glass with naturalistic motifs in the Art Nouveau style inspired by the work of their fellow townsman Emile Gallé. Painters and decorators, chief among them being Henri Bergé, provided designs executed by numerous skilled craftsmen under the supervision of Auguste. The originality of Daum glass lies in the diversity of such decorative techniques as enamelling, etching and casing developed for large-scale production, rather than in the quality of decoration. All pieces made after ...

(b 1880; d 1971).

French glassmaker who established a studio at Conches, where he was an early exponent of Pâte de verre, which he used from c. 1900 to produce small glass sculptures and figures, initially in an Art Nouveau style and later in a more austere idiom. By 1904 Décorchemont had developed a method of colouring glass to make it resemble translucent stones....

(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 ...

(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....

American glasshouse established in 1885 in Meriden, CT by Philip Handel (1866–1914); in 1900 a second factory was opened in New York City. The company was best-known for its Art Nouveau shades for gas and electric lamps; some shades were leaded and some reverse-painted with plants, animals and landscapes. In ...

(b New York, March 31, 1835; d Newport, RI, Nov 14, 1910).

American painter, decorative artist, and writer. He grew up in New York in a prosperous and cultivated French-speaking household. He received his first artistic training at the age of six from his maternal grandfather, an amateur architect and miniature painter. While at Columbia Grammar School, he learnt English watercolour techniques and afterwards studied briefly with George Inness’s teacher, the landscape painter Régis-François Gignoux. In 1856, while touring Europe, he spent a few weeks in Thomas Couture’s studio. Returning to New York via England, he was impressed by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings at the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857 and later said that they had influenced him when he began to paint. In 1859 he decided to devote himself to art and moved to Newport, RI, to study with William Morris Hunt.

Unlike Hunt, who never broke away from the manner of Couture and Jean-François Millet, La Farge rapidly evolved a highly original and personal style characterized by free brushwork, unusual colour harmonies, and great delicacy of feeling (...

(Jules)

(b Ay, Marne, April 6, 1860; d Paris, 1945).

French jeweller, glassmaker and designer. He began his studies at the Lycée Turgot near Vincennes and after his father’s death (1876) he was apprenticed to the Parisian jeweller Louis Aucoq, where he learnt to mount precious stones. Unable to further his training in France, he went to London to study at Sydenham College, which specialized in the graphic arts. On his return to Paris in 1880, he found employment as a jewellery designer creating models for such firms as Cartier and Boucheron. His compositions began to acquire a reputation and in 1885 he took over the workshop of Jules d’Estape in the Rue du 4 Septembre, Paris. He rejected the current trend for diamonds in grand settings and instead used such gemstones as bloodstones, tourmalines, cornelians and chrysoberyls together with plique à jour enamelling and inexpensive metals for his creations. His jewellery, which was in the Art Nouveau style, included hair-combs, collars, brooches, necklaces and buckles (e.g. water-nymph buckle, ...

[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 ...

Bohemian glass factory. In 1836 a glass factory was founded by Johann Eisner von Eisenstein in Klostermühle in the Bohemian forest. In 1840 production was taken over by Eisenstein’s son-in-law Friedrich Hafenbrädl, who began making window and table glass. In 1851 Dr Franz Gerstner (1816–55) and his wife Susanne Lötz-Gerstner (b 1809), who had previously been married to Johann Lötz (1778–1848), bought the factory. From 1858 the company was named and in 1863 registered as Lötz Witwe (‘Lötz widow’). In 1878 the factory exhibited a range of coloured glass at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The following year Lötz-Gerstner’s grandson Max Ritter von Spaun (1856–1909) took over the company and employed Eduard Prochaska (d 1922) as managing director. Over the next two decades the factory was substantially enlarged, and by 1891 the company employed 200 glassworkers, 36 cutters, and 30 glass painters. The company had representatives in various European cities, including ...

(b Ropczyce, nr Rzeszów, March 19, 1869; d Wadowice, nr Kraków, July 8, 1946).

Polish painter, printmaker and decorative artist. From 1887 he studied at the School of Fine Arts in Kraków under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz (1828–1900) and Jan Matejko. In 1889 Mehoffer and Stanisław Wyspiański, as the two most talented pupils of the School, were engaged to assist Matejko in his decorative wall paintings for the Gothic Church of St Mary in Kraków. This work aroused Mehoffer’s interest in both fresco and stained glass. In 1889–90 he studied at the Kunstakademie, Vienna, and in 1891 he travelled through Salzburg, Innsbruck and Basle (where the work of Arnold Böcklin caught his imagination), eventually going to Paris. There he studied at the Académie Colarossi, at the Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs and, from 1892, in the atelier of Léon Bonnat at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts. During his stay in Paris (1891–6) he devoted much time to studying works by the Old Masters in the Louvre; he also studied architecture, making a tour of medieval cathedrals in France in ...

(b Liptószentmiklós, Hungary [now Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia], Dec 26, 1858; d Sepsibükszád, Transylvania [now Romania], Feb 23, 1944).

Hungarian glass artist. In 1881 he was employed in the Zayugrócz (now Uhrovec, Slovakia) Glassworks, in upper Hungary, where he was director of the glass-painting studio. He later worked in the Ujantalvölgy Glassworks. During this period he gained recognition for acid-etched pieces. From 1907 to 1914 he leased the Sepsibükszád Glassworks. He produced ornamental pieces in the Art Nouveau style, with acid-etched decoration of plants and animals. His pieces were built up of thin layers of different colours, resulting in fine pastel shades; the outer layer was left in a natural matt finish. Sovánka was awarded a gold medal at the World’s Fair in St Louis in 1904 and at the Esposizione Internazionale del Sempione in Milan in 1906.

Hungary, §VII: Glass

Slovakia, §V: Decorative arts...

(b New York, Feb 26, 1836; d Rome, Jan 29, 1923).

American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer (see fig.). He studied under Tompkins Harrison Matteson in Shelbourne, NY, and went to Paris in March 1856. After eight months in the studio of François-Edouard Picot, he settled in Florence until the end of 1860. There he learnt drawing from Raffaello Bonaiuti, became interested in the Florentine Renaissance and attended the free Accademia Galli. A more significant artistic inspiration came from the Italian artists at the Caffè Michelangiolo: Telemaco Signorini, Vincenzo Cabianca (1827–1902), and especially Nino Costa (1827–1902). This group sought new and untraditional pictorial solutions for their compositions and plein-air landscapes and were particularly interested in the experiences of Gustave Courbet and the Barbizon painters. They became known as Macchiaioli for their use of splashes (macchia) of light and shadows and for their revolutionary (maquis) attitude to prevailing styles. Among Vedder’s most notable Florentine landscapes are ...