The museum Collection Repository features sketches by the French artist and designer Lucien Bonvallet (1861-1919) – drawings that offer a glimpse behind the scenes of decorative art, revealing what is usually hidden from the viewer: the very process of searching for form.

Bonvallet was born in Paris in 1861, and studied at the National School of Decorative Arts. He began his career designing textiles – embroidery, lace, and carpets—and it was during this early stage that he established his signature style: he thought in terms of line, pattern, and rhythm. Flowers, leaves, pinecones, and feathers in his work were transformed into a stylized decorative language – recognizable, yet never literal.

For nearly three decades, Bonvallet’s name was inextricably linked with the house of Cardeilhac – the leading Parisian workshop of artistic silver. From the 1890s onward, he created services, vases, and cutlery for the firm, decorated with the stylized thistle, aquilegia, and mistletoe. In 1900, these works were showcased at the Paris Exposition, and in 1913, at his solo retrospective at the Museum of Decorative Arts. It was a classic path for the Art Nouveau master: line, ornament, botanical motif, and metal.

It is precisely within the artist’s collaboration with the workshop that the role of the sketch becomes clear. What we see is not a finished result, but the very moment when a line can still change and an ornament can shift. It is a sort of "pre-object" – a reminder that decorative art begins not with the material, but with the concept, and only then does the line become silver, glass, or porcelain.

The final period of the master's life is of particular interest. In 1917, just two years before his death, Bonvallet turned to a new material and a new client – the famous Baccarat crystal manufactory. This personal turn for the master coincided with a turning point in the history of the manufactory itself. Baccarat produced its first perfume bottle back in 1860; at the time, these were simple, rectangular vessels with a flat facet for the perfumer's label. But at the turn of the century, everything changed: perfumers abandoned apothecary bottles in favour of the "image bottle," capable of embodying the brand's recognizable identity. By 1907, Baccarat was already producing around four thousand bottles a day, and over a hundred and fifty perfume brands – Guerlain, Coty, Piver, Worth, and others – had worked with the house. The bottle ceased to be mere packaging and became part of the part of the fashion house's signature language, a signature item.

Bonvallet’s late works for Baccarat thus stand on the borderline between two eras: he still thinks in terms of the botanical lines of the silver Art Nouveau, but already applies them to crystal – a material that is about to become the defining language of perfume luxury in the interwar years.

The sketches presented in the museum Collection Repository, feature several different bottles with stoppers: the artist tries various silhouettes, different shapes for the neck and stopper, accompanying his search with pencilled calculations of proportions. It is precisely in this way – artistic variations of form alongside working calculations – that Bonvallet’s sheets dated "after 1900," currently stored in the museum Collection, are structured. While this is not direct proof of the precise dating of these sketches, the working manner aligns closely enough to confidently attribute the drawings to the master’s late, "Baccarat" period.

What we see, then, is not merely a beautiful drawing, but a rare document of a transitional era: a moment when the Art Nouveau artist who had worked with metal his entire life tests his skill in crystal ­– the very material that would soon become the definitive protagonist of 20^th century perfume luxury.