Rene Jules Lalique's childhood seems to have been a bit of a mystery, but we do know that he was born on April 6, 1860, to Jules and Olype Berthellemy Lalique. His family lived in Ay, France, in the Champagne region, about 100 miles northeast of Paris, for the first two years of his life.
By 1862, his family had moved to Paris, where his father ran a business selling new things. During Rene's childhood, he and his family made...
Rene Jules Lalique's childhood seems to have been a bit of a mystery, but we do know that he was born on April 6, 1860, to Jules and Olype Berthellemy Lalique. His family lived in Ay, France, in the Champagne region, about 100 miles northeast of Paris, for the first two years of his life.
By 1862, his family had moved to Paris, where his father ran a business selling new things. During Rene's childhood, he and his family went back to the small town where they grew up often to see family and friends. This is where and when he began to love the outdoors. He loved going on walks with his grandfather through the nearby fields and woods, where he could study nature up close. He was interested in everything about nature, from plants to animals.
He started school at the Turgot Lycee near the suburb of Vincennes in Paris. There, he studied art and won first prize in a drawing contest.
Rene started working as an apprentice with one of the best jewellers in Paris at the time, Louis Aucoc, when he was sixteen, not long after his father died. Most likely, his mother told him to do this. During his time there, he helped Louis make jewellery in the popular Rococo style and learned how to use the tools, materials, and methods of his trade. He also went to classes at the local school for decorative arts in the evenings.
After finishing his training in 1878, Rene moved to the London suburb of Sydenham and spent a couple of years at The Crystal Palace School of Art, Science, and Literature. Lalique spent a lot of his free time in London's museums while he was in England because he loved them.
By 1880, Rene had moved back to Paris, where he worked as a wallpaper and fabric designer by day and studied sculpture at night.
After a year, he had found a job as a jewellery designer for Jules Destape, which would be his job for the next twenty years. He had a full-time job and also did freelance work for some of the larger jewellery houses in Paris.
Rene went into business for himself in 1885. Destape went into retirement, and Lalique took over his business. Now that his workshop was fully staffed and he no longer had to work for someone else, he could focus on his own Art Nouveau designs. Which were heavily featured in the French jewellery trade magazine "Le Bijou" and were admired by his competitors, who copied them. The "magic" of Lalique was that he didn't use the usual precious metals and expensive gems and stones. Instead, he used cheaper materials like translucent enamels, semi-precious stones, ivory, etc.
By 1900, Lalique had made the most beautiful jewellery he could. He showed his work at the Exposition Universelle Internationale in Paris and got praise from all over the world for the way he mixed symbolism and realism. But because his work was constantly being copied, Rene started to focus less on his jewellery "art forms" and more on making glass.
Rene started making perfume bottles for Coty in 1909. Most perfumes were sold in plain bottles before this. Lalique used what he knew to make perfume bottles that reminded people of the scents they held. By the 1920s, he was also making bottles for some of the best perfumeries in France, like Houbigant, d'Orsay, and Molinard, to name a few.
In just a few years, he had learned to make statuettes, vases, tableware, bowls, and other things out of glass, like architectural panels. These panels were used to decorate the dining car of The Orient Express and the best ocean liners of the time.
That wasn't the end of it. In the 1920s, his glass mascots could be seen on the hoods of many of the most expensive cars. In fact, these are the things that people want to collect the most right now.
During World War II, from 1939 to 1945, the Lalique factory was closed. Rene died on May 5, 1945, so he never got to see the building reopen.
