A PAIR OF BESPOKE ART NOUVEAU BEDSIDE TABLES

by Eugène Vallin, ca.1904.

Eugène VALLIN (Herbévilliers, 1856 - Nancy, 1922)

An exceptional pair of bespoke bedside tables or showcases in padouk (sandalwood) manufactured by Vallin for Renée Masson and Pierre Bachelard. Nancy, 1904.

Height 186, Width 68, Depth 53 cm.
(Small accidents).

AN ART NOUVEAU MASTERPIECE

Jean-Baptiste Eugène Corbin is a paragon among the great patrons of the Art Nouveau period. Having made a fortune with his Magasins réunis department store chain, he employed the most famous figures of the Nancy School, among which Majorelle, Daum and Prouvé. In 1903, his brother-in-law and associate Charles Masson asked Eugène Vallin and his assistant Victor Prouvé, to design an exceptional dining room that is now displayed in the Nancy School Museum, formerly the Corbin House. A year later, in February 1904, on the occasion of his daughter Renée Masson’s wedding to Pierre Blanchard, lawyer and manager of the Magasins réunis, Vallin was commissioned to design dining room and bedroom furniture for the apartment where the young couple lived at 8, rue Mazagran in Nancy. The artist's watercolor drawings reveal the importance of this order; his dining room furniture was even presented at the Nancy Decorative Arts Exhibition in October of the same year.


After the Masson-Bachelard couple left Nancy, the bed, wardrobe, dressing table and our pair of bedside tables were sold to Mr. Alphonse Gaudin, 97 rue Charles III in Nancy. The furniture was then sold by the auction house located on Rue du Sergent Blandan in Nancy in 1956 (according to Charpentier) or in the early 1960s (according to its buyers). A couple of Nancy academics, Pierre Danchin, professor of English and future president of the University of Nancy II and his wife Georgette, mother of a large family, bought the bedside tables. Their children clearly remember the arrival of the bedside cabinets at their home in the early 1960s. The bed and wardrobe were sold again at auction on March 25, 1982. The Musée d'Orsay was astute when acquiring both and exhibiting them in its room number 64 (ref. number OAO 710 and OAO 711).


Devoid of any decoration, this furniture owes its beauty to the use of a precious exotic wood called padouk. With their unusual size, our bedside tables are a testimony to Eugène Vallin's "expressive" period, during which the artist simplified his lines and turned to stylization. On our pieces of furniture, the "Vallin sheath", one of the great constants of his art, connects the frontispice to the glass door. In its lines, one can imagine plant motifs among its moulded scrolls (Descouturelle, image n°28, p. 97). The bed and the other pieces of furniture found in this room are meant for much more than rest. As Frédéric Descouturelle wrote in his monograph on the artist, they are “a formidable ship sailing on the sea of dreams”.

Although this bedroom furniture never belonged to philosopher Gaston Bachelard, despite claims to the contrary by the Musée d'Orsay, we wish to conclude with lines he wrote to celebrate the majesty of woodworking and seem to have been written for this masterpiece of the French decorative arts: "In its fibers, wood always remembers its vertical vigor and working against the wood grain, against its fibers, requires skills. Therefore, for certain psyches, for instance in Eastern philosophies, wood is some kind of fifth element - or fifth matter -, and it is quite common to find it listed among the fundamental elements." (Air and Dreams, 1943).