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Acceptance speech delivered at the Académie de Stanislas in the public session of 17 May 1900 and printed in the “Mémoires de cette Compagnie” in the seventeenth book of the fifth series, for Émile Gallé’s election as a member of the Académie de Stanislas in 1891:

At the very moment when I came here to thank the Académie de Stanislas for the honour it has bestowed upon me by public admission, I am aware of what I owe you for the hospitality: almost ten years!

My mentors have not been too harsh towards the parsimony of my contribution to their works. And I am only too well aware of your patience, as well as of the insufficiency of my credentials compared to your favours.

These delays, simply tolerated by you, deprive me today of joy. Two friends who were my guarantors with you are missing – Jules Lejeune and Pastor Othon Cuvier are no longer with us. I mention these two noble persons, not out of vanity, but I appreciate that by welcoming a craftsman too superficial in his various experiments, you paid credit to the good judgement of these two valued men, both of them being paragons through the light of their charity, their tolerance of any sincere belief, and their honourable zeal to unite men in appreciation, study, and peace.

They only had to alleviate a little my anxieties and doubts, not about your kindness, but about myself. My commitment to our Academy dates far back to my youth, to the days of annual sessions, these ancient and good Thursdays in May when my classmates from high school in Nancy, Hubert Zæpfell and the angelic Paul Seigneret, two pure victims, picked us up from the joys of the noisy Institution Leopold to come and listen, in this royal decor, to the Lacroix, the Margeries, the Burnoufs, the Benoîts, the Godrons, the Lombards, the Vollands, and the Duchênes.

Our young humanities savoured the indulgence of a generous science, of an Atticism, pretty as the golden Jean Lamour guipure. Who would have thought that the mediocre student of the best masters ever would one day dare to present, here, in front of many, a belated French essay?

This task will find favour, I hope, more easily thanks to the choice of a familiar theme in my usual work. It might be more sincere and more significant. Hence it is from a composing decorator, an image assembler, who requires voice this time, who wants to talk to you about the symbolism in the decor.

Imagining themes that are specific to coating lines, shapes, shades, thoughts, the decoration of our homes and the objects of utility or pure pleasure, adapting its purpose in a material-specific way to metal or wood, marble or fabric; it is, without any doubt, an absorbing occupation. But it is actually more serious, the consequences grave, which the creator of the adornments usually does not suspect.

Daisy vase (front and reverse), 1874–1878. Faience, white tin glaze, yellow-reddish flakes, height: 17.4 cm, width: 17 cm, depth: 7.5 cm. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich.

Smoking service: tray, tobacco tin, ash tray, cigarette holder, and match case, date unknown. Faience. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.

Each implementation of human effort, however minute the overall result may be, is summed up in the gesture of the sower, sometimes an awe-inspiring gesture. However, per chance or intentionally, the designer, too, acts as the sower. He plants a field, the decor, devoted to a special culture, the decor, to tools, to some workmen, to germs, to special crops.

Because among the ornaments that arise from his conventional issues, the most humble as the most exalted ones can one day become elements in this compelling documentary ensemble: the decorative style of an era. Indeed, any creation of art is conceived and born under influences, amidst the atmosphere of reverie and the most customary volition of the artist. It is there, in any case, that his work arises from. Regardless of his consent, his concerns are like a newborn for godmothers, good fairies, or witches, who cast evil spells or confer magical gifts.

The work will bear the indelible mark of cogitation, a passionate habit of mind. It synthesises a symbol in the unconscious, in the depth. Some Asian rugs contain, amongst the frame and the wools, a silky female hair, that is the personal branding of the task performed, such as a faded ribbon in a closed book reveals the page meditated upon, preferred, the page sometimes interrupted forever.

Thus, the designer intermingles into his book something of himself. Later on, we unravel the skein; we will find the blanched hair, the dried tears – making the autographs of Marceline Valmore often unreadable – and exhale something inaudible or the sigh of weariness and disgust for the involuntary and repulsive task, or the manly satisfecit of the poet:

We ignore the name of this fine artist thinker, Egyptian statuary, royal goldsmith, mage, or temple decorator, who, having stopped to contemplate the agitation of a muddy insect, the dung beetle, the dung-making skua kneading a ball of manure, in order to lay its eggs into the heat of the Libyan sand, was moved by religious respect.

He was the first one to know, beyond the appearances, to discover a noble image and invent this mystical gem, the sacred scarab. Its forelegs – and later in the Phoenician imitations its outstretched wings – support the solar sphere, source of the light, of the heat; in his hind legs he maternally rolls another celestial body, a globe, the earth where it puts down the seeds of life. What a testimony given by the inventing artist, to the existence of a creative God, the providential development of the satellite with the source of heat! Strange and very ancient prescience, it seems, the global terrestrial planetary form itself: here you have an artistic, cosmographic, religious, and divinatory symbol. But what is especially corroborated with the artist is that such an invention is a testament of the spiritual quality and the habitual thinking of surprising and prophetic beauty.

Hen terrine, after 1880. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 16 cm, width: 27 cm, depth: 18 cm. Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels.

Lion-shaped candlestick, 1874. Faience, reddish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 43 cm, diameter: 23 cm. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich.

Cockatoo pitcher, designed in 1874, executed in 1889. Faience, yellow flakes, blue tin glaze, height: 38 cm, diameter: 19 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.

Duck jardinière, 1884–1889. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 18 cm, width: 21 cm, depth: 14.5 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen.

This characteristic example allows me to set aside the more or less boring definitions that have been given for symbol, symbolism, and symbolic art. We mean it, don’t we? That the symbol in the various fields of art, poetry, religion, is the representation of a thing, usually an abstract, conventional representation, agreed amidst insiders, which is in the decor, in the vase as well as in the coin, the statue, the painting, the bas-relief, the temple, or in the poem, the sung or mimed work. It is always the translation, the awakening of an idea for a picture.

In the unpolished symbol surges the epitome, said Maurice Bouchor. And the symbolic decoration humbly adapts to this definition: up to it to render just any figure ornamental, any synthesis of drawing, plastic, shades, designed to turn them into the most subtle abstractions provided he is something of a poet, he has carte blanche, for the poet is a symbolist par excellence. How will the decorator do it? A bit like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: “I will bring a rose bud with thorns as a symbol of my hopes, mingled with many fears.”

But it is desirable that the symbol is not too enigmatic for the spirit of France likes clarity. As Hugo says:

The idea that to which everything yields is always clear.

And the French audience, in front of the modern British anthologies, sometimes real blooming charades, takes pride in the end, as Victor Hugo, deciphering the riddle:

Does this mean that the rose is more romantic than the peony? “The weeping willow,” said the aesthetician Lévéque in The Science of Beauty, “does not weep more than other willows, the violet is not more modest than the poppy.” The moral expression of plants is purely symbolic.

Fellow citizens of one of the most charming symbolists, Grandville, we have learned to read in Animated Flowers and Stars, and we know that this eloquence of the flower, through the mysteries of its body and its destiny, through the synthesis of the plant symbol seen through the eyes of the artist, sometimes exceeds in intensely suggestive power the authority of the human figure. We know that the expression in our heraldic thistle for example, is specific to the brave gesture and, in other plants, with a tilted front, with a thoughtful appearance, with a symbolic nuance and shade, the curves, and perfumes are the terms of what Baudelaire called: “The language of flowers and silent things.”

Owl, c. 1889. Faience, reddish flakes, float glaze mottled in brown, white, and olive green, height: 33.5 cm, diameter: 13.5 cm (base). Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.

“Fleurs ornemanisées” plate, “Fleurs héraldiques” service, 1889. Faience, grey flakes, blue paste tin glaze, height: 3.5 cm, diameter: 26 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen.

“Herbier Lorrain” plate, c. 1870. Faience, grey-yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 3.5 cm, diameter: 23.1 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.

This presents a question: What is the decorative quality of the symbol? To use a professional term, is the symbol in the ornament ‘furnishing’? Does the symbolist not sacrifice the pleasure of the eyes to mind games? It is certain that the symbolic sign of the noblest idea will not make a more decorative mark than any ordinary rosette, if it is not invigorated by drawings, enhanced and emphasised by simulacrum, using the prestige of reliefs or shades of colours. Equally evident is the fact that it is not the use of the symbol that will magically give special graces to a decor, without the presence of talent and genius.

But will he who does not consider that the artist looked at reproducing the flower, the insect, the landscape, the human figure, and seeks to extract the personality, the inside feeling, perform a more vibrant work and of a more contagious emotion than the one whose tool will be nothing but a camera or a cold scalpel?

The most scrupulous naturalist document reproduced in a scientific work does not move us, because the human soul is absent, whereas the reproduction, albeit a natural reproduction of the Japanese artist, for example, captured the spirit of the evocative motif in an inimitable way, or the little faces sometimes mocking, sometimes full of melancholy of the human being, the thoughtful thing. He will unconsciously, moved only by his passion for nature, create true symbols of Forest, of Joys of Spring or Sorrows of Autumn.

Thus, in the ornament, the symbol is a bright spot within the quiet and anticipated meaninglessness of the foliage and the arabesques; the symbol captures attention, it is the symbol that introduces the thought, the poetry and art. The symbols are the point where reality translates into ideas.

But also, frankly, it would be useless to advise the decorator against the use of the symbol, which is so readily accepted in poetry. And as long as the mind guides the pen, the brush, the pencil, there can be no doubt that the symbol continues to charm men. Moreover, the love of nature always leads to symbolism: the flower beloved by all, popular, will always play a major and symbolic role. Gutskow says that a researcher of true happiness, having questioned the flower, then questioned the star. In turn the star said to the man: “Go quickly back to the cornflower.”

No more than poets can jewellers or lace makers do without nature. It is their right, it is their expertise, and it is the living source! Victor Hugo, the great agitator of symbols, admitted:

Calderon paid the flower this tribute: “If my voice is new, if I got a new heart, it is to the flower that I owe my renewal!” And for him, the flower became the symbol of the reconciliation with moral beauty, with divinity.

To banish the symbol of the decor, we will have to clear our sphere from the firmament:

This golden sickle in a field of stars!

We should turn off “the morning star and the evening star”, we should erase these quotes, the constellations. For the symbol to disappear forever in art, we will have to clear, “God, the sacred star that perceives the soul”, being, in fact, the word of the entire nature, from reign to reign, from symbol to symbol, from reflection to reflection:

The word is God: The constellations say this to the silence!

And that is precisely what has been the strength of our national art, from its primitive manifestations until the emotional gesture that ascends the prayer of our cathedrals skyward. That is what made its beauty in its green expansion of the 13th century: because it was not locked up in the studio, like ivy on the trunk of the oak, it clung to the free nature, this is to say, to symbolism itself. Baudelaire worded in a grand way this view of harmonic resonances in the vast creation:

And herein lies the history of our national Celtic decor, Gallic, proud child of the harsh nature, son of the druids, the bards, always coming back, after all the invasions, those of the South and those in the East, after all the mixtures, all the styles, Roman and barbarian, to its Nature, to the Nature with its free genius, to its sources, native flora and fauna, to the joy of the worker to freely adorn his home to his liking, lovingly.

And hence, our popular decor, unknowingly symbolist, like nature itself, as the green oak and the moor, goes from the foliated pottery from Champagne to the ivy and these vines of these delicate Gallo-Greek works, concede this neologism for the century. The spirit of terror then formulated in joyful wishes on cups talking of Reims and Vichy, which recalled the Greek chalices, and presaged our gallant Gallic pottery of the 16th and 18th centuries. Similarly to our contemporary repentance towards decorative art, are happy returns to the Brocéliande, the legendary Celtic Forest, as were the glorious national foliage of the 13th and 16th centuries.

Bowl, 1872–1874. Faience, yellow flakes, light blue tin glaze, height: 9.5 cm, width: 29 cm, depth: 7.5 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.

Coffee pot, c. 1882. Faience, yellow-reddish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 35.5 cm, width: 16 cm, diameter: 11.5 cm (foot). Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.

Barrel Rider pitcher, c. 1876. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 28 cm, width: 16 cm, depth: 13.5 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.

Candlestick, c. 1878. Faience, yellowish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 21.5 cm, diameter: 13.5 cm. Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.

Cup, 1872–1874. Faience, yellow-reddish flakes, white tin glaze, height: 10 cm, diameter: 7 cm (mouth); 6 cm (base). Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart.

Clock, c. 1880. Faience, yellow flakes, white tin glaze, height: 41.6 cm, width: 35 cm, depth: 11.8 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.

Because it is the ancient pottery of Gaul which in ‘rustic earthenware’ by Bernard Palissy, reappears, moulds closely to nature like a fossil footprint, is dressed in true colours, wetting objects with a liquid enamel, it is clear that, in prevailing reproductions, the specific characteristics of our various fern fronds, and at the brink of still freshwater or flowing water, the nature of our marsh or river shells, our crustaceans and our fish.

Yes, we know it was once fashionable for some individual professors to belittle from the top of some oxymora pulpits, in some sectarian sanctuaries, applied art and works from our traditional crafts. Let me seize this opportunity to proclaim the principle of the unity of art, paying homage to the proud ancestor, to one of the leaders of the French arts of fire, to the Symbolist of terracotta art. And just to do it justice, let us recall the excellence of the concerns about the origin of the clays, and the French invention, Gallic, of the fritted glazing. Let Palissy speak for himself about his purpose, his goal:

A few days after the emotions and civil wars were allayed, and it had pleased God to send us His peace, I walked one day along a meadow of the town of Saintes, close to the river Charente. And while I was contemplating the horrors of which God had spared me at the time of past turmoil, I heard the voices of some girls sitting under willow trees and singing a hymn of Psalm CIV.

And because their voices were silky and well-toned, it made me forget my first thoughts, and being stopped to listen to the hymns, I left the pleasure of the voice and entered into contemplation on the meaning. And I said to myself: Admirable goodness of God! My goal is to have for the works of your hands as much reverence as David in the Psalm. And I therefore thought of building a garden in accordance with the drawing, the ornament and the excellent beauty that the Prophet described in this psalm, a dome of refuge that would be a holy delight and honest occupation of body and mind.

So, here is the mystery of Bouvard and Pécuchet – A Tragi-Comic Novel of Bourgeois Life responsible for this pedantic quip of one of our modern French critics (Brunetière) with respect to the works by Palissy: “There is no art in a pot, because there is no aim,” that is to say premeditation. Yet there was precisely a holy purpose for the potter, a genuine desire to initiate men, through reproductions of nature, to see God through the similarities and the beauty of the most humble works.

In turn, will the modern decorator have enough sincerity, faith, to make shoot out of his work a symbolic, rejuvenated, free art, creating through and by means of constant observation of the nature, the progress and the highest and best ideal, entitled to be amongst the usual concerns of an artist?

First of all, the nature of today contributes with new forms; science offers novel symbols, features, unknown to our ancestors and nature and proper to draw the attention of those who have ‘unlearned’ the familiar things. In the flow of ideas and the exchange between our current decorative workplaces we can already see today the potato, this good old tuberous crop, the alpine Paradise lily or Saint-Bruno lily, the Cretan dittany, the mallows, the dicentra, introduced since the beginning of the century, and which, by its twisted shape, so elegant and suggestive, with its tender colours, by the winged fold of its two outer petals, now stands as a symbol of love and cordiality; the flower that features the typical corolla, turbined; periwinkle, the Golden Saxifrage of a dubious good faith, and bittersweet; of the illustrious family of good poisoners, the sister of poisons, or rather of intense remedies: henbane, belladonna, the bittersweet mandrake, what a touching emblem!

This is the flavour of the fertile pain, the salutary ordeal; it is the emblem of the anxious ethics. We confess our preference for the good old plants, dear to our foremothers. But the fast, modern trend is deeper, more powerful than the quiet stream of our penchants. It carries everything away. It throws, like a last bouquet of Ophelia, an orchid, with a wealth of an unimaginable strangeness of forms, species, perfumes, colours, voluptuousness, pleasures, and disturbing mysteries.

Finally, science, on all sides, opens new horizons to the designer. Oceanography, which finds in Nancy one of its most passionate fans, is like the king of the sea in the tales of the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, who carries in his arms his terrestrial beloveds to give them a tour of the blue palace

These secrets of the ocean were delivered by brave researchers. They clear their fishing nets, which like laboratories, create decorative art workshops, museum models. They draw, they issue for the artist such unexpected materials, enamels and cameos of the ocean. Soon the crystal jellyfish will inject touches and innovative curves to the chalices of glass.

“La France” large plate, 1884. Earthenware, red flakes, glaze mottled in light brown, brown, and grey, height: 11.7 cm, diameter: 43.5 cm. Musée des Arts et Métiers, C. N. A.M., Paris.

“Cri-Cri” vase, 1889. Faience, yellow-grey flakes, white tin glaze, coated with blue-yellow glaze, height: 19.5 cm, diameter: 15 cm. Designmuseum Danmark, Copenhagen.

Thus to find, next to the new forms and decorations, the symbols of a new art, all we have to do is to look around, to inquire, to study and to love; symbol springing spontaneously from the decorator out of these allied forces: the study of nature, the love of his art and the need to express the feelings that belong to our heart.

This is what the artist of the 19th century has too often forgotten. This epoch, surprisingly, admirable in so many ways, claimed to produce a decor, in flooding the world industrially and commercially, and that under very special conditions, although unfortunate, the current performers of these settings have hardly been able, in a similar way as their ancestors, to enjoy the pure joy of the worker’s love for his opus, the composer himself is dragged into slavish imitation of the past, copies of which thinking were absent, whose symbol, created by other times, is misunderstood by ours, and responds to other needs, to a different conception of life.

This was one of the errors, one of the bitter concerns of the age of industrialisation, the exaggerated division of labour, of its organisation far away from home, from family and of its natural environment, in a hostile, artificial atmosphere. The century that will end had no folk art, that is to say, art applied to utility objects and executed spontaneously and joyfully by the artisans themselves for their trade; only the better-informed of our contemporaries, the most generous minds, the most laborious and the noblest artists had noticed it.

Vase, 1884–1889. Faience, yellowish flakes, brown lustre glaze, height: 21.4 cm, diameter: 13.3 cm. Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris.

But let us welcome the return to a better design of work. William Morris, the great artist, this humanitarian philosopher, the prophet of joy at work, said that work is human, that it is good, that art is salutary; that art blesses, is a saviour, it is folk art, that is to say, it is the expression of a man in his work.

And we can proclaim in our turn our deep faith in the doctrine which assigns to art a function of human culture, of awakening minds and souls through the rendition of beauty spread on the world.

Are such lofty goals prohibited when referring to art? Who would dare to argue before the heavenly calligraphy of the Alhambra, the lodges of the Vatican, the Sistine panelling, full of bonhomie allegories, simplicity, gentleness, and love, symbolic and suave art, the Christian art of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, the cemetery of St Calixtus? Is it not precisely because the symbol lives and vibrates in these elite works that they have so mysterious an action on souls? It is also the scene as it was accomplished by Puvis de Chavannes.

“Moissonneurs égyptiens” cup, designed in 1884, executed in 1889. Transparent glass with green powder inclusions, height: 8.2 cm, diameter: 7.5 cm. Glasmuseum Hentrich, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.

Chrysanthemums vial, 1884. Brown transparent glass, height: 14 cm, diameter: 10.9 cm. Glasmuseum Hentrich, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.

Goldfish pitcher, designed in 1878, executed in 1900. Light olive-brownish transparent glass with red and dark green inclusions, height: 14.2 cm. Musée de l’École de Nancy, Nancy.

Pitcher, 1884. Brown transparent glass with black powder inclusions, height: 19.8 cm, diameter: 14.1 cm. Glasmuseum Hentrich, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.

“Jeanne d’Arc” vase, 1889. Transparent glass with overlay in red-brown and black, height: 43 cm, diameter: 22 cm. Daiichi Sankyo Kusuri Museum, Nagoya.

“Les Carnivores” chalice, 1889. Transparent glass with gold foil inclusions and opaque brown-red overlay, height: 13 cm, diameter: 12 cm. Kitazawa Museum of Art, Suwa.

A woman, old and emaciated, sacrifices a life full of piety and mercy, a body that must be supported and stands upright by keen charity, is supported with a noble concern on the balcony of a terrace. The night is far gone. The stars faded. The city sleeps. It is the child of this woman. This is a maternal apprehension for the city that forced her to stand up, that tied her to her place in the cold morning.

St Genevieve fears the fire for her Lutetia. The Huns outside, the enemy within. Paris, you can sleep. Genevieve is listening in silence. The lamp is also on and her hand is placed on the stone as if she feared to awaken a newborn. This shadow of a mother is the very symbol of love. This lamp is the symbol of the enlightened soul. The silence emanating from the opus and surrounding it, everyone takes it away in his heart.

Let me stop after this excellent example of the purest symbol.

My conclusion is therefore that the idiom for ‘symbol’ is closely fused with the term ‘art’. Conscious or unconscious, the symbol signifies, vivifies the oeuvre; it is its very soul. And at the dawn of the 20th century, please allow me to greet the revival of a national popular art, heralding better times.

“This is the work of the modern artist”, said Charles Albert at the Congress for Art in Brussels, “which will create the tone of tomorrow.” This work must be a fight for justice around us, for Justice inside of us. And hence life in the 20th century will no longer miss joy, art, or beauty.