Lucien Falize (1839-1897) was a French jeweller, enameller, and trade writer who, with his father Alexis Falize and later his sons, ran one of the most respected Parisian ateliers of the second half of the nineteenth century. His career spanned the Second Empire, the Third Republic, and the high years of the Belle Époque, and his pieces are now held by the Musée d'Orsay, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Walters Art Museum, and the Cooper Hewitt collection in New York. He is remembered primarily for the technical revival of plique-à-jour and cloisonné enamel and for the historicist style in which his firm worked.

Background and training

Lucien was born in Paris on 4 May 1839 to Alexis Falize (1811-1898), himself a jeweller who had trained in the studio of Jean-Baptiste Mellerio and later set up his own atelier on the Rue d'Enghien. The young Lucien entered his father's workshop after a classical education and travelled in Italy and the Netherlands before joining the family firm in earnest in the early 1860s. The Falize household was unusually literary by the standards of the trade: Lucien wrote prolifically for the Revue des Arts Décoratifs and other journals, producing essays on enamelling, on Japanese metalwork, and on the history of French goldsmithing that remain useful primary sources.

Cloisonné and plique-à-jour revival

The Falize workshop was among the first in Paris to engage seriously with Japanese cloisonné technique after the opening of Japan to Western trade in the 1850s. By the late 1860s Alexis and Lucien were producing cloisonné jewellery on gold grounds, with cell walls finer than anything previously seen in European production. The 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris was a turning point, with Falize cloisonné pieces shown alongside imported Japanese goods. Through the 1880s Lucien led a parallel revival of plique-à-jour, the medieval technique in which translucent enamel is held in unbacked metal cells to produce a stained-glass effect when held to the light. Falize plique-à-jour wings and petals appeared in brooches, pendants, and tiaras and were imitated widely.

Style and historicism

Falize's design vocabulary drew on Gothic, Renaissance, and Japanese sources, often within a single piece. The firm produced a notable series of cathédrales brooches in the 1880s, set with precious stones and enamel grounds, as well as Romanesque-inspired clasps and Renaissance-style girdle pieces. Unlike his contemporary René Lalique, Lucien Falize did not move into the symbolist Art Nouveau idiom; he remained committed to a historicist position grounded in metalwork tradition and was at times publicly critical of the decorative excesses he saw in fin-de-siècle taste.

Trade with Bapst and the Crown Jewels sale

From 1880 to 1892 Lucien Falize was in partnership with Germain Bapst, the seventh-generation jeweller of the family that had served the French Crown since the eighteenth century. The Bapst-Falize firm produced some of the most ambitious pieces of the period, including ceremonial commissions and historical reconstructions. Germain Bapst was also one of the principal historians of the French Crown Jewels, and the partnership allowed Lucien access to important documentary material that informed his published writings.

Later years and succession

After dissolving the partnership with Bapst in 1892, Lucien continued the family firm under the name Falize Frères, with his three sons André, Pierre, and Jean. He died on 11 January 1897 at the age of fifty-seven. His sons continued the business into the twentieth century; the firm exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle and remained in operation until 1936. Falize pieces appear regularly at major auction in London, Paris, and Geneva, where the cloisonné and plique-à-jour examples in particular continue to draw strong interest from collectors of nineteenth-century jewellery.

Lucien Falize's significance lies less in any single iconic object than in the steady technical excellence of the workshop he ran and in the body of writing he left behind. He helped re-establish French enamelling as a leading European craft after a long eighteenth-century decline, and his published criticism remains required reading for serious students of nineteenth-century jewellery history.