Glass Lalique (René Lalique Art Glass)

René Lalique is a well-known for his art glass (Glass Lalique), but not that many people know that he was originally a freelance jeweler when he started his career in 1881. He used mold pressing to form the glass objects, such as perfume bottles, decanters, bowls, and Art Nouveau vases, as well as designing clocks, lamps, tableware and stemware later during his career.

Art glass Lalique started to make more publicly in 1902 by starting a glassworks near Paris, where he created decorative panels and molded glass plaques. The background in jewelry helped him to make extraordinarily detailed and well-finished products using some basic jewelry making methods.


Lost wax (cire perdue) is a method in which you carve a design into wax by hand, press into clay in order to create a mold and finally melt it out so that you can pour molten glass in. This method wasn’t too sophisticated but Lalique mastered it quite well and therefore was able to create very nice art glass through couple of decades.

Lalique produced art glass from 1909 in Combs-la-Ville, located close to Paris, which was a place that had attracted glassblowers for a long time because of the great supplies of silica-rich sand which is needed in glass making process. Glass Lalique made didn’t have lead in it, which means that it couldn’t be labeled as lead crystal, but he liked more the inexpensive and easy-to-work-with demi-crystal. The final products had a soft opalescence on them which he liked especially much.

In the 1930s Lalique designed a lot of perfume bottles that he had started to do already early on, making for example perfume bottles for other perfume makers such as d’Orsay and Roger et Gallet. One of those productions included a bottle that has one of his famous tiara stoppers as a bottle crown. He got more name and was associated with perfume bottles and that helped him to produce also his own empty perfume bottles, and there are two designs, Amphitrite and Tantot, which are quite well known examples of those.

After the World War I Lalique was especially productive producing many unique sculptural objects and vases, and the Courges vases that were made during that period are examples of more colorful production that was quite rare for Lalique. He also opened a factory that was able to produce glass art in high volumes, making his designs more available to the big masses.

One interesting detail of of all the art glass Lalique produced were about 20 so-called car mascots that were designed as hood ornaments on luxury cars that are nowadays the most expensive Lalique pieces out there. They include heads of for example roosters, peacocks, horses, goldfish, a wild boar and a frog.

Lalique was also involved in some high-profile architectural projects during his career and his glass designs got influences from those projects, making for example shapes of some of his vases feel very architectural. In the 1930s he also designed tableware and home glassware, as well as all kinds of lidded boxes, ashtrays, and clocks.

The depression era in the 1930s was quite harsh for many glass designers, and Lalique was not an exception, so the Combs-la-Ville glassworks was closed in 1937 and the second factory because of the Second World War in the beginning of the 40s. Unfortunately the great glass art designer passed out soon after that as well, but his great work will never be forgotten.

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