There are artisans whose names few people know today, even though their works are intimately familiar to anyone who has ever admired French silver from the turn of the 20^th century: thistle and columbine, chestnut leaves, and carved ivory right where one would expect the cold smoothness of metal. Lucien Bonvallet (1861-1919) was one of these masters.

For three decades, he worked closely with the Parisian house of Cardeilhac, creating pieces where silver was transformed into living plant ornamentation. However, in the final years of his life, Bonvallet unexpectedly turned to a completely different material: Baccarat crystal. It is this little-known final chapter of his career that is particularly fascinating: the artisan accustomed to the world of silver and the Art Nouveau style, found himself at the very origins of a new direction for his craft – the creation of crystal items.

Bonvallet was born in Paris in 1861. In 1878, at the age of seventeen, he entered the National School of Decorative Arts, where he studied until 1885. The future ceramicist Auguste Delaherche studied alongside him, and his teachers represented entirely different disciplines: the architect Anthime-Marin Delaroc taught composition, Edmond Lechevallier-Chevignard, then-director of the Sèvres manufactory, taught drawing, and Aimé Millet taught sculpture. Such an education does not pass without a trace: later, Bonvallet’s work would reflect this architectural mastery of form combined with a sculptural attention to detail – a rare combination for a decorator.

He did not start with metalwork at all. He dedicated the early years of his career to designs for embroidery, lace, and carpets. It was during this time, by all appearances, that his signature style took shape: he thought in terms of line and rhythm rather than the object itself. In his hands, a flower, a leaf, a pinecone, or a feather was transformed into a recognizable but never literal pattern. This ability to stylize nature without losing its essence is what he would later bring to silver.

From the late 1880s, Bonvallet worked for the house of Cardeilhac, and their most intensive collaboration occurred between 1894 and 1899, as the firm prepared for the 1900 Paris Exposition. During this period, almost everything one could imagine as a table decoration of a wealthy Parisian of that era came from his hands: tea and coffee sets, coffee pots, chocolate pots, soup bowls, jardinières, candelabras, salt cellars – and an impressive surtout de table, where the jardinière and candlesticks were brought together into a single composition.

He borrowed his ornamentation from nature, always returning to a distinct circle of motifs: thistle, columbine, mistletoe, clover, and chestnut leaf. His chased silver is paired with carved, tinted ivory, used for handles and finials –a combination of materials that became, perhaps, the signature trademark of his pieces. One chocolate pot, featuring a tinted ivory handle, was particularly fortunate; shown at the 1900 Exposition, it achieved such immediate success that the model was later reproduced in various sizes, decorated sometimes with poppies, sometimes with thistles. In 1901, the critic Léon Maillard wrote in the magazine L'Art décoratif about Bonvallet’s fresh and modern approach to silhouette, calling the exhibition set of his design one of the most cohesive silver ensembles of the entire exposition. At the same time, Bonvallet turned to copper, practicing dinanderie – a then nearly forgotten craft that he also attempted to steer toward the Art Nouveau style. Some fruits of these experiments are stored in the museum collections, including the Luxembourg Palace. In January and February 1913, the Museum of Decorative Arts held a solo exhibition for Bonvallet in the Pavillon de Marsan, showcasing everything from silver and copper to carpets, embroidery, earthenware, and glass.

And then, something happened that no one, perhaps, could have expected. In 1917, just two years before his death, Bonvallet took on a completely new material and a new client – the famous Baccarat crystal manufactory. The timing was not accidental, though it was likely due to a coincidence rather than calculation. Baccarat had been producing perfume bottles since 1860. Initially, these were simple, rectangular vessels with one flat facet for the perfumer's label. By the beginning of the 20^th century, everything had changed: perfume houses began moving away from apothecary simplicity toward the "image bottle". By 1907, Baccarat was producing around four thousand bottles a day, and his client list included a hundred and fifty perfume houses – Guerlain, Coty, Piver, Worth. The bottle ceased to be a mere vessel, instead acquiring the form of a brand's signature language.

It was at this precise moment that the old master of the silver Art Nouveau took on crystal. The Repository of the museum Collection feature sketches from this period – several variations of a bottle with a stopper: Bonvallet tries one silhouette for the neck, then another, penciling in the proportions nearby. A similar style – variations of form interspersed with working calculations – is found on his other sheets dated after 1900. While it is difficult to determine the exact date of these sketches, the technique remains recognizable, making it possible to attribute them to the late, "Baccarat" period with complete confidence.

Such sketches are a rarity: what we see is not a finished work, but the very moment before the form has been decide – where a line might shift, a stopper change, or a proportion be refined.

Bonvallet was a Knight of the Legion of Honor; he lived in Paris, where he died in 1919. After his death, his name was rather quickly forgotten, and a true revival of interest in the master’s legacy did not occur until the 1960s – when his works were shown, most notably, at MoMA in New York. A serious critical reappraisal of his entire oeuvre, however, came only in the 1990s. Nowadays, the artist’s archive and the collection of his preparatory drawings are stored in the Musée d'Orsay, having been received in 2010, as a bequest from the collection of his daughter, Jeanne Autexier (1908–2009). The pieces he created for Cardeilhac, primarily the dinner and tea services with aquilegia, thistle, and mistletoe motifs, are highly prized by modern collectors. Meanwhile, his late sketches for Baccarat remain practically unexplored testament to how an artisan who had worked with metal his entire life suddenly began, in his latest years, to speak the language of crystal.