Every beautiful fragrance deserves a beautiful bottle. Rene Lalique is the man who actually invented perfume bottles and truly deserves the title "the inventor of modern jewellery".
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Born in 1860, in the small village of Ay in France, Rene Lalique would rise to the top of many fields before his long career would end in 1945. When he was 16 years old, Rene became apprenticed to the jeweller Louis Aucoc, one of the leading jewellers working in Paris at the time, and this provided a perfect opportunity for the young Rene Lalique to learn jewellery production and design from the ground up.
He attended Sydenham Art College in 1878 in London, and returned to France in 1880 where he worked and studying under the sculpture Justin Lequien at the Ecole Bernard Palissy. By 1881, Lalique was working as a freelance designer for many French jewellery firms and a growing list of clients. The year of 1890 saw the creation of some of Rene Lalique's most celebrated jewellery designs, as well as his experimentation with glass.
In 1897 Lalique received first prize at the Salon in Paris, where he exhibited ivory and horn hair combs. This same year he was also awarded the Croix de la Legion d'Honneur for the jewellery he exhibited at the World's Fair in Brussels. By 1900, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, Rene Lalique was a sensation with the roughly 50 million visitors to the Exposition.
By 1908 Rene Lalique had already made significant experiments with the use of glass in his jewellery and in decorative objects, and it was that year that he designed the first perfume bottle changing the face of the perfume business forever. Prior to that, perfume bottles were just plain flasks that held expensive perfumes. But with the invention of synthetic oils that could be used to mass produce perfume, Rene Lalique saw the potential to take a plain everyday object and turn it into an art object.
In 1920's Rene Lalique brought his design and industrial talents to creating just about anything that could be made artistically with glass. This also included car mascots, light fixtures, statues, fountains, and a dizzying array of other objects. His car mascot creations are legendary to this day, and can sell for well over 200,000 dollars for the rarest of his works. The most expensive and fanciest cars of his day were adorned with one of his mascots. He also designed bases to hold the mascots, and special wiring and lighting inside the base that could be adjusted using coloured filters, so that the mascot would glow in any of several colors while the car was being driven.
Today, the output of Rene Lalique, commonly referred to by his moniker, RLalique, is highly sought after in many different fields of collecting. Perfume bottle collectors value RLalique bottles most highly. RLalique glass architectural commissions, windows, glass panels and the like, are fiercely competed for in their rare appearances on the auction block.
Collectors of seals highly value the wonderful RLalique designs, and the jewellery of Rene Lalique creates huge prices at auction when it crosses the block. His production vases are collected by people all over the world. He was in his time, and remains even today, more than 60 years after his death, The Man in many fields. ■
