Puiforcat — French Silversmith of the Art Deco Period
Puiforcat — French Silversmith of the Art Deco Period
The Paris house behind some of the twentieth century's most disciplined silver
Puiforcat is a French silversmithing house, founded in Paris in 1820 and best remembered today for the rigorously geometric silver hollowware, flatware, and objets it produced under the direction of Jean E. Puiforcat in the inter-war Art Deco period. The house has continued in business almost without interruption since its foundation, was acquired by Hermès in 1993, and remains under Hermès ownership in the present day, where it functions as the group's silver atelier and produces both reissues of the historical Jean Puiforcat designs and new commissions.
Foundation and the nineteenth century
The firm was founded by Émile Puiforcat in 1820 as a manufacturer of silver flatware and table objects in the historicist styles then prevailing in French silver. It expanded over the nineteenth century into hollowware and centrepieces, building a reputation for high-quality silver smithing without yet developing a distinctive house style. The house was a participant in the world's fairs of the late nineteenth century and was awarded medals at successive Paris and London exhibitions for the quality of its silverwork, but its design vocabulary remained largely conventional until the inter-war period.
Jean E. Puiforcat and the Art Deco transformation
The transformation of the house came with Jean Émile Puiforcat (1897-1945), the great-grandson of the founder, who took artistic direction in 1921 after returning from service in the First World War. Jean Puiforcat reframed the house's design language in line with the geometric and reductive aesthetic that would come to be called Art Deco, drawing on Cubist composition, classical geometry, and an austere sense of mass and proportion that had no precedent in nineteenth-century silver. His tea services, vases, candelabra, and centrepieces stripped historicist ornament away in favour of pure cylinder, cone, and sphere forms, often combined with hardstone — lapis lazuli, rock crystal, jade, and ivory — for handles, finials, and foot rings.
The 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, which gave the Art Deco movement its name, established Jean Puiforcat as one of the leading silver designers of the period alongside Jean Després, Christofle, and Tétard Frères. He continued to design for the house through the 1930s and into the wartime years, producing a body of work that is now held in the permanent collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art also hold significant Puiforcat pieces.
The jewellery dimension
Puiforcat's output has always been weighted to silverware rather than jewellery, but the house produced limited jewellery in silver and gold during the Jean Puiforcat period and intermittently since. The jewellery shares the design vocabulary of the silverware — geometric, restrained, often combining metal with hardstone in flat planes and clean lines — and is sought after by collectors of inter-war French jewellery alongside work by Raymond Templier, Jean Després, Gerard Sandoz, and Jean Fouquet, the broader cohort of Modernist French jewellers of the period. Puiforcat jewellery from the Jean Puiforcat era trades on the secondary market through the major Paris and London auction houses, and pieces with documented Puiforcat provenance command significant premiums.
Under Hermès
Hermès International acquired Puiforcat in 1993 as part of the broader Hermès strategy of acquiring small French heritage houses with deep craft credentials. Under Hermès the silver atelier has been preserved at its workshop in Pantin outside Paris, and the historical Jean Puiforcat patterns have been re-issued in flatware and hollowware. The house also produces new commissions, including bespoke commissions for collectors and corporate clients, and it remains one of a small number of French silver houses operating at the level of full hand fabrication in the studio tradition. Production volumes are deliberately small, and Puiforcat silverware is sold through Hermès boutiques and a handful of authorised dealers.
In the trade
For Skyjems and the broader collector trade, Puiforcat is encountered most often as Jean Puiforcat-era silverware coming up through European and American auction houses, where Art Deco silver and Modernist French jewellery have a stable and active collector base. Vintage Puiforcat pieces are routinely sold at Sotheby's, Christie's, Phillips, and the major Paris auction houses, with provenance documentation drawn from house archives, the catalogues of the 1925 Exposition and successive 1930s salons, and the published catalogue raisonné. Recent reissue silverware from the Hermès era trades at retail and through the secondary market at prices that reflect the ongoing premium associated with the Puiforcat name. The crossover with the fine-jewellery market, while smaller in volume, includes work that is highly coveted by Art Deco specialists worldwide.