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Émile Gallé “Épis de Blé” Server

$175,000

Rare, important and well renowned, this visually exciting and weighty piece, a server of monumental proportions, by Émile Gallé has and will be celebrated arm in arm with the greater ouevre of Art Nouveau masterworks, indefinitely. Deeply ribbed and energetically undulating, the frame encompassing the upper tier and lower shelves imbue the piece with a charged sense of movement while the serenenity and lightness of the landscape scenes on the outward facing panels bring levity to the rewarding heaviness of the composition. Gilt bronze details in exciting, oversized scale encompass the piece on either flank in tender embrace, adding to the remarkable conversation created within the piece between far off landscapes and exaggerated, minute detailing.

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  • Product Details
  • Curator's Notes

Item #: F-19042
Artist: Émile Gallé 
Circa: 1903 
Dimensions: 65" height, 54" width, 24" depth 
Materials: French walnut, Fruitwood marquetry, Bronze
Signed: "Gallé"
Literature: A similar server/buffet is pictured on the cover of and on p. 125 of: Gallé Furniture, by Alastair Duncan and Georges de Bartha, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2012

Though Art Nouveau masterpieces rarely pay homage to previous or contemporary artistic movements, Gallé breaks with tradition here to give a nod to the great French realists, like Courbet and Millet, with his highly sensitive landscape portrait of field workers in the upper very upper portion of the piece.
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