![]() ![]() It also provided the impetus that launched the Daum brothers as designers and manufacturers of art glass, a process they soon mastered. The Daums displayed their handsome tavern glasses at the Paris International Exhibition in 1889, an event that launched both the Eiffel Tower and the French Art Nouveau movement. By the late 1880s, an ambitious Auguste Daum had made commercial drinking glasses the firm's stock in trade, which served as the basis for the promotional self-defense line: "Handsome tavern glasses have to be very white to enhance the liquid's tantalizing color, voluminous in aspect to attract the client, very thin on the rim to please the lips, very thick in the walls and bottom to contain next to nothing, and finally very heavy for use in self-defense." The company sputtered along under the guidance of Daum's two sons, Auguste and Antonin, both of whom shared their father's complete lack of glassmaking experience. It was a desperate move, and he quickly discovered that it was hard to make a living manufacturing watch glasses. The Daum company history began in 1878 when a French attorney of in modest means named Jean Daum (pronounced "dome") reluctantly took over the operation of a dilapidated watch-glass factory in Nancy, in the eastern French province of Lorraine. Of course, there is also a line of modern Daum drinking glasses, although none of them would serve very well as a weapon in a barroom brawl. But unlike many other of the well-known names in the collectible world, Emile GaIIé for instance, the House of Daum continues to turn out highly prized pieces using techniques that arc becoming more and more uncommon. Like many collectible antique glasswares, there are very few of the highest-quality antique Daum pieces, and even fewer in prime condition. In the same auction, a more conventionally styled lamp sold for $,325,000, and a single-light lotus lamp appeared inexpensive in comparison at $145,000. Even in 1989, a peak auction-market period, such prices were usually rare, with peaks of only I or 2 million French francs, which at that time meant $400,000 or less. ![]() ![]() "It was the most artistic lamp made by Daum and Majorelle, and the only one I have seen in 30 years," says Lloyd Macklowe of the Macklowe Gallery in New York City, who has probably seen and handled more artistic Daum than anyone else. "The Lamp," as it is known in collectors' circles, is an overlay glass (by Daum) and bronze (by Majorelle) three-light table lamp in the shape of a lotus. Who would have ever thought that a company which in the nineteenth century advertised its tavern glass as "very heavy for use in self-defense" would become one of the finest names in collectible antique art glass in the late twentieth century? But that's exactly what has happened to France's House Of Daum, Ltd., which still manufactures drinking glasses today.Īlthough certainly not a heavy-duty tavern glass, one piece of Daum's artistic work, made in collaboration with bronze maker Louis Majorelle of Nancy, astonished auction market watchers in 1989 by bringing in $1.76 million at a Sotheby's New York auction. ![]()
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