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KÂ- MONDO / KAPANDJI MORHANGE

Everyone knows Émile Gallé, founder of the École de Nancy an…
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Everyone knows Émile Gallé, founder of the École de Nancy and one of the great creators of the style that would soon be known as Art Nouveau, both in France and around the world. The Leonardi collection you are about to discover in this sale presents a lesser-known facet of Gallé's intellectual and artistic development, but one that is just as essential and decisive, the one that would later lead to his glass masterpieces. In fact, thanks to the shaped pieces produced in Saint-Clément, then in Raon-l'Étape and finally in Nancy, Émile Gallé, following in the footsteps of his father Charles, began with earthenware. His early work already revealed an extraordinarily rich, erudite and experimental universe. In his ceramic creations, Gallé explored a decorative language still marked by the eclecticism of the Second Empire and the rocaille style, but in which the principles that would make him so original were already apparent. We discover an artist with a passion for nature, history, the arts of Japan, old engravings and symbolist and pre-image poetic landscapes. symbolist and pre-impressionist poetic landscapes. His early experiments were naturally guided by several major founding themes. First, naturalism: wild flowers, ponds, rivers, insects and plants borrowed from his beloved Lorraine, but also from the decorative repertoire and shapes of 18th-century earthenware, giving rise to a dreamy, sensitive and poetic naturalism. Then there was Japonisme: the use of enamels in coulures, decorations inspired by Imari porcelain, landscapes and plants from the Far East that fascinated him, a taste for asymmetry, free forms, the fusion of decoration and object, and a new way of looking at nature. Finally, a deep love of his homeland and of Lorraine in particular: the beggars of Jacques Callot, his famous Mezzetin, the seascapes of Claude Gellée dit le Lorrain or those of Joseph Vernet; the romantic ruins evoking Hubert Robert, and finally the regional and national mottos and puns. I hope you'll find them as pleasing as I did, in his talking casserole evoking the Porte Saint-Georges in Nancy, the good King Stanislas, the motto of Bar-le-Duc, and the thistles and Crosses of Lorraine slipped into his decorations, constantly blending his three great centres of interest: nature, history and Japanese art. His organic forms evoking branches, nets and corollas, his Japanese-style decorations treated in blue monochrome in the spirit of Delft earthenware, and his symbolist and poetic visions - the red moon, vases with lenticular bodies, blossoming coprins, fishing nets that still seem to carry the freshness of fish, fauna, insects and shellfish from Lorraine's ponds - all appear to have been created with a science of decoration that owes nothing to chance. So long before the great multi-layered glassworks and Symbolist furniture that would make him internationally famous, Émile Gallé's early earthenware already contained the seeds of the whole spirit of the École de Nancy: a union of poetry, nature and the decorative arts in the service of a total art form that was profoundly modern, technical and alive. For Gallé, the object is no longer purely utilitarian: it becomes a veritable decorative poem in which form, material and decoration tell a story. Let yourself be charmed by this collection, which will plunge you into the world of Gallé's youth and, I hope, inspire you to include some of these works in your public or private collections. Élie Morhange
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About the sale Sale of the Collection of Mr L. & à Divers: Émile GALLÉ earthenware, Majorelle, Saint-Clément, Glassware, Bronzes
Auction location
Auction time 06/10/2026 at 2:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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