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The important collection of René Lalique's precious, original designs, produced on vegetable parchment, drawn in pencil or in Indian ink and embellished with watercolors and gouache, are extremely rare works of high graphic quality. They are annotated by the own hand of the artist indicating their true origins in genuine greatness; these designs are the inestimable testimony to the talent of the creator behind the revival of the art of jewelry at the end of the last century.
After the discovery in 1868 of the South African Diamond Mones, Lalique's contemporaries proposed pieces of poor inventive quality concentrating on items produced to glorify the precious stones rather than develop a new art form; they are entirely representative of their period. Convinced of the dearth of creation in this field and the need to supply jewelry makers with designs, he contemplated producing an industrial art publication consisting of etched engravings. Although this project never saw the light of day, he did contribute to a somewhat similar magazine, Le Bijou.
In 1884 Lalique set up his own business and established himself as a designer and jeweller. With a wise commercial outlook, Lalique chose to incorporate bright colored enamels, patterned "pates de verre" and semiprecious stones into his creations, the stones selected purely for their decorative value. For nearly thirty years, before concentrating exclusively in glass in 1912, René Lalique revolutionized the realm of jewelry; he invented new forms, conceived new designs and used new materials for necklaces, pendants, clasps, brooches, tiaras, rings, earrings, bracelets, combs and other precious "objets d'art" such as mirrors, jewelry boxes, seals and paper knives. His innovative creations, inspired particularly by flora and insects, obtained immediate and immense success. It made René Lalique one of the most famous creators of his time.
Among this collection are the drawings for famous pieces of jewelry belonging to private collections or well-known public collections. These studies are the keys to understanding the material transposition of Lalique's jewelry.
Lalique was an untiring and deeply curious observer of the most minute detail; when he was not doing so in the country or in the Museum, it was in his studio that he studied specimens, particularly fresh-cut flowers. If the flora and fauna had the predilection of the artist because of ornamental deformations, Lalique knew he could make pieces of greater value by developing their foliage, their petals, their pistils and their wild and unusual appearance. René Lalique also know how to transpose their natural munificence by using materials such as horn, tortoiseshell, ivory, glass, enamelled gold and glazed, translucent enamel. Furthermore, the artist continued to admire the human form, such as faces of women, figures if vestals, plagiarism. Lalique's drawings are of infinite value in enabling us to complete our knowledge of his work as a jeweler. His contemporaries recognized the fact as early as 1899 Roger Marx wrote that their coherent sequence constituted the artist's "Book of Truth". It is these plates which are the focal point of the collection.
Like almost all the drawings from between 1895 and 1905, this collection of drawings are done in watercolor and gounache on wove paper bearing the watermark of the former Blanchet Freres Kleber factory: BFK in double block letter. In order to obtain a smooth, translucent and impermeable surface, the paper was coated with a preparation with a linseed oil base, which with time has given it an ochre-yellow color that is probably darker than it was originally, and has made it as brittle as glass. The paper was in all likelihood treated by the retailers and tinted to suit the requirements of different clients. Most of Lalique's jewellery designs done on this support are extremely precise and complete, and were used as the pattern for production.
Lalique was a genius at adaptation and composition; he did not copy nature of stylize its various elements: what he did was to create as he transformed. He then imparted life to his pieces through the magic of the material. When the combined bodies of the long-winged insects compose architectural forms or quiver as they gather honey, even when the flowers are the framework of the statement or the subject of the jewelry, it is never a matter of ideal representation of the species, but rather of that particular wasp or damsel-fly, wood-anemone, speedwell or opium poppy. Every plant is identifiable and, in her remarkable study, Sigrid Barten, art historian as much as occasional botanist, has gone to such lengths of precision as to restore it's Latin name to each one.
When he created his work, Lalique referred to his own observations on the motif, remembering the characteristics specific to each species as well as their occasional attitudes. He betrays a predilection for the for the hanging cones of the spruce fir, a hazelnut's leaf-like involucre, the undulation leaves and silky plumes of the bull thistle, or the hooked thorny lace-work of sweet-briar or dog-roses.
Ranking high as the third largest collection world-wide of original René Lalique drawings, behind those of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs and the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum is Lisbon, Gallery Moderne's collection is the largest and best available on the commercial market.
