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Antique ArtNouveau MuchaMajorelleGruberStyle SignedNancyStainedGlass SilveredBox

About the Item

Influenced by the Art-Nouveau illustrations of Alphonse Mucha, this antique French jewelry box display case is decorated with silvered bronze or brass low-relief plaques, which are dominated by a curvaceous head of a profiled lady with hair swirling around her face. The box also features semi-transparent sides of stained glass in the same mottled pink, peach and white colors of the famous Villa Majorelle staircase-window created in the 1890s by Jacques Gruber for metalsmith Louis Majorelle's home in Nancy, France. Like a showroom, the pair filled it with many of their collaborative Art Nouveau-style decorative objects, such as furniture, lamps and smaller tabletop items that also included glass and metal. On a glass side-panel of the box is the etched pencil signature "Nancy", which is most often associated with the French glassworks Daum that also collaborated with Majorelle. Otherwise, the box was made in this Eastern France city by associated artisans known as the Nancy School, who would have worked together between 1890-1914 to create pieces for the significant turn-of-the-century decorative-arts pavilions in Paris and for fairs like the Exposition de l'Ecole de Nancy in 1903. Notably, the interior glass of the box is matte like slag glass produced by their American contemporary Louis Comfort Tiffany, while the exterior has enamel-like iridescence in colors associated with the former Tiffany Glass artisans who incorporated their own business The Quezal Art Glass & Decorating Company in New York by 1902. Although the French-city signature on this box is located on the glass, it exactly matches script signatures on the interior of metal lamps that were produced at the Nancy-based metalwork-specialized atelier Cherpion, where almost all of its decorative objects were unsigned and often custom-made for glass-specialized companies such as American Quezal or French Muller Freres, whose company signatures can be found instead on their glass shades. Comparatively the small rectangular pieces of stained glass in this box are each approximately 1.5x3 inches, while the rest of the materials may have been too decorative or thin for an engraved metal signature. Over the beveled clear glass hinged lid, the mixed-metal maiden-silhouette overhangs the front of the box by a half inch for easily lifting and lowering. The interior base is a mirror, whose dark-grey back is visible on the framed underside. A long mark on the underside on the metal border directly below the maiden could be a faded signature.
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