'Les Pins de Ravenne', a Vase, Circa 1900

Bill Warmus reminds us that, ‘In Japan, cicadas are the harbingers of death at the peak of happiness; in nature the grub spends years underground and has only a brief life (a few weeks) in the sunlight where it sings incessantly.’ (p. 134) This vase expresses Gallé’s at once melancholic and romantic sensitivity to the fragility and transience of life, to the eternal conflict between the forces of light and of darkness, a theme that finds its specific expression in his vase ‘Débat Éternel’ (lot 205), and an oblique expression through such symbols as the cicada in the present work or the moths that evoke dawn and dusk in his celebrated bed, ‘Aube et Crépuscule’.

The version of this vase in the Musée de l’Ecole de Nancy was executed in 1903 as a wedding gift to his friend and champion Henry Hirsch. It bears the engraved inscription from a poem by Dante about love ‘Sous les pins de Ravenne aux bruissantes cigales, Ils écoutent leurs coeurs battant à l’unisson.’ (‘Beneath the pines of Ravenna and their noisy cicadas, They listen to their hearts beating in unison.’). The context of this gift celebrating the new life together of the married couple from the terminally ill artist gives added poignancy to Gallé’s artistic investment in this work.