08.10.2024
To the 170th birth anniversary of Leopold Lambert (video)
Léopold Lambert was born in Aix-en-Provence in October 1854. His parents owned a hotel, the business was quite successful and it was assumed that the son will continue the family business. Since his childhood, the boy demonstrated creativity, was drawing and constantly mastered something from wood and clay. Later was the apprentice of the prominent artisan, creator of automata, Gustav Vichy. Grasping everything in a single flash, Leopold Lambert quickly mastered mechanical dolls’ business and soon became the senior master. In 1886, Lambert decided to start his own business – a workshop for the production of mechanical dolls, jukeboxes and expensive luxury goods similar to Vichy's products.
A few years earlier, in 1876, Lambert had married. His wife was the Parisian expert with the needle, Eugénie Maria Bougeois. After the marriage, she began to assisting Lambert by sketching costumes and sewing clothes for the dolls produced in the workshop.
The mechanical automata created in the workshop of Lambert workshop were a success and were in demand. The artisan took an active part in various exhibitions and always knew how to impress the sophisticated public. So, presented by Lambert at the World Exhibition in 1900, 90-centimeters, singing serenades doll “Mephistopheles”, became one of the most discussed items of the exhibition. This was followed by success at the exhibitions in Liège in 1904, and in Milan in 1905.
By 1910, mechanical dolls gradually began to be replaced by electric novelties, mechanical automata sold out worse and worse. Gradually, the enterprise of Lambert enterprise began to decline. The most rocky times for the workshop happened after the end of the First World War – in starving and destroyed Europe, no one wanted the dolls. The last years of his life the master survived on a small allowance from his son Lucien. Leopold Lambert died in Paris in the spring of 1935.
The museum Collection section “Amusing automata” features about 50 automata produced in the workshop of Leopold Lambert.
Photo album, comprised for the anniversary of the artisan is posted in the museum Photo Gallery.
In the fall of 2022, museum Collection hosted the thematic exhibition “Circus Parade”, which presented unique automaton dolls of the second half of the 19th
– early 20th centuries from the museum Collection repository. Within the framework of the exhibition, visitors could get acquainted with the history of the companies-manufacturers of mechanical dolls and learn the peculiarities of creating automata and their mechanisms’ arrangement. Two excursions through the exhibition “Circus Parade” (The 1st and 2nd parts) are posted in the video excursions sequence “Walking through the Museum”. During these tours, the audience will see these amazing exhibits in operation and hear the tunes that accompany their performances.
The exhibition features items by famous French masters such as Leopold Lambert, Gustave Vichy, Jean Marie Phalibois, Jean Roullet, Ernest Decamps, Alexandre Théroude and others. The exhibits presented at the exhibition are united by the theme of circus, one of the oldest and most popular entertainment forms of art.
