École de Nancy

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

The École de Nancy (Nancy School) is the group of artists, craftsmen and manufacturers who, between 1890 and 1914, made the city of Nancy in Lorraine one of the capitals of Art Nouveau. Glass, furniture, ceramics, jewellery and stained glass took the shape of flowers, leaves, dragonflies and butterflies: nature became the main source of inspiration, studied with a botanist's eye and transformed into decoration.

A border city

The birth of the school is bound up with history. After the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Alsace and much of Lorraine passed to the German Empire, while Nancy remained French. Many artists, craftsmen, teachers and businessmen left the occupied areas and moved to the city, which enjoyed a period of great economic and cultural growth. The decorative arts also became a way of asserting the region's French identity.

The Provincial Alliance of Art Industries

The school was formally organised in 1901: on 13 February its statutes were published, under the name "Provincial Alliance of Art Industries". The founding committee consisted of Émile Gallé, its president, the cabinetmaker Louis Majorelle, the glassmaker Antonin Daum and the cabinetmaker Eugène Vallin. The aim was ambitious: to produce everyday objects in series, furniture, glass, ceramics, with high-quality craftsmanship and original forms, bringing art into everyone's home.

Gallé, Daum and Majorelle

The leading figure was Émile Gallé (1846–1904), glassmaker, ceramist and cabinetmaker, passionate about botany and Japanese art. Using techniques of layered, engraved and cameo glass, he created vases and lamps in which flowers and insects seem to emerge from the material. By the end of the 1880s he ran a business with over three hundred employees, and at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle he reached the height of his fame. A man of strong civic commitment, in 1898 he was among the first to speak out in defence of Alfred Dreyfus. Alongside him, the Daum brothers' glassworks set out to apply the principles of decorative art industrially, while Louis Majorelle made furniture in fine woods with gilt-bronze mounts shaped like water lilies and orchids. His home, the Villa Majorelle (1901–1902), designed by Henri Sauvage with stained glass by Jacques Gruber and ceramics by Alexandre Bigot, is a manifesto of the style.

End and legacy

Gallé's death in 1904 and then the First World War marked the end of the golden age, and in the 1920s taste shifted towards Art Deco. But the École de Nancy remains one of the finest examples of collaboration between art, craft and industry, alongside the Arts and Crafts movement and Jugendstil. Its works can be admired today at the Musée de l'École de Nancy and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and the Daum crystal works is still active.