, Émile (1846-1904)

French glassmaker and founder of the School of Nancy, a group of decorative artists who were to have considerable influence in propagating Art Nouveau in France. Son of the glass and ceramics retailer Charles Gallé, he began designing glass and pottery decoration for his father at an early age, later studying design, botany, and mineralogy in Weimar and glassmaking at Meisenthal. From the 1870s onwards he produced glass and, to a lesser extent, furniture and pottery, for which he gained recognition at the major exhibitions in Paris. By now he had his own factory and his output was prodigious. In 1901 he formed the Alliance Provinciale des Artistes, known as the École de Nancy, with support from the designers Victor Prouvé and Louis Majorelle. Prouvé was to run his factory after his death. Gallé's products were sold in Samuel Bing's Paris shop, L'Art Nouveau, and in the year of his death (from leukaemia) he opened a shop in London. Influenced early in his career by both Islamic and Venetian glass, and later by the art of the French Symbolists, Gallé mastered every imaginable technique for making and decorating glass, cleverly exploiting imperfections such as air bubbles, clouding, and crazing. He was most successful in cased glass of two or more coloured layers, cut to form subtle designs inspired by his life-long passion for botany. These sinuous, naturalistic subjects placed him at the forefront of Art Nouveau design.