About Louis Majorelle

Louis Majorelle was a decorator, French artist, cabinetmaker, ironworker and furniture designer who manufactured his own designs. He was one of the outstanding designers of furniture in Art Nouveau style. Louis Majorelle was born in 1859 in Toul, France & died in 1926 in Nancy. The son of a cabinetmaker, Majorelle was trained as a painter and went in 1877 to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Jean-Francois Millet. After his father's death in 1879, he returned to Nancy to manage the family. He was a pupil of Theodore Devilly and Charles Petre at the School of the Art schools of Nancy. IN 1877, Majorelle was received at the School of the Art schools of Paris where he moved for two years of further study. On the death of his father, Auguste Majorelle (1825-1879), he cut short his studies and returned to Nancy to oversee, with his brother, the family's manufactories of faience and furniture. In the 1880s the firm turned out pastiches of Louis XV styles, but the influence of the glassmaker Emile Galle inspired Majorelle to take his production in new directions. His early work was in a Rococo style but as a member of the Nancy School he was influenced by Galle and adopted Art Nouveau forms, creating an individual, elegant style. He favored exotic and strongly grained woods, such as mahogany, and often used gilt bronze mounts. Majorelle in 1894, replaced the decoration varnished or painted furniture rubble and japonisant styles with the profitable style of inlaid decoration with references to naturalists and Symbolists. From the 1890s, Majorelle's furniture, embellished with these inlays, took their inspiration from nature: stems of plants, water lily leaves, tendrils, dragonflies. Soon he added a metalworking atelier to the workshops, to produce drawer pulls and mounts in keeping with the fluid lines of his woodwork. The work of metal will be developed for the realization of bronzes decorating furniture as well as the manufacture of luminaries in collaboration with Daum, since 1898. It will make publish its ceramics in workshops of the Lorraine area and will carry out models of objects out of sandstone for Alphonse Cytere (Rambervillers) and the Mougin brothers. It will open many stores of exposure, in particular in Paris, Lyon and Oran.