GAILLARD, Eugène
French designer. He was a barrister by profession but abandoned a career in law for interior design and decoration. Although known almost exclusively for his furniture, he also designed a wide range of objects and decorative schemes in an elegant Art Nouveau style.
Early in his career, Gaillard collaborated in Siegfried Bing’s fashionable Art Nouveau shop in Paris. Together with Georges de Feure and Edward Colonna, he created interiors and furniture for Bing’s pavilion, Art Nouveau Bing (destroyed), at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. Under Bing’s direction, these artists carried out an aesthetic programme that laid claim to ‘the old French tradition’ infused with ‘a lively spirit of modernity’. Gaillard was responsible for three rooms in the pavilion: the vestibule, dining room and bedroom. French precedents, especially elements from the Rococo style, were freely used as a source of inspiration. In the vestibule, Gaillard installed a mosaic floor, bold pink draperies and a stencilled frieze that effectively set off a walnut portmanteau with mirrored back and shelves. The dining room was furnished in walnut, ornamented with scrolled foliage and panelled wainscot, beneath a mural painted by the Spanish artist José María Sert (1876-1945).
Later in his career Gaillard designed deeply moulded furniture with sharply curved corners displaying carved decoration; he consistently favoured sinuously flowing, carved panels and ormolu drawer pulls. His popular chairs do not exhibit excessive ornamentation, being of a plainer, heavier construction, often with leather seats instead of decorative upholstery fabrics.
About 1903, Gaillard ended his collaboration with Bing and established his own firm, which produced furniture of similar designs. By 1907 Gaillard had simplified his designs significantly; his furniture became lighter in contrast to the rather ponderous style of earlier pieces, and the decoration was less strident.
Until 1914 Eugène Gaillard designed exquisitely elegant furniture in the Art nouveau style. His approach to design and motifs reveals floral inspiration yet was not intended to imitate nature, as he explained in a 1906 essay entitled “À Propos du Mobilier”. Gaillard’s designs developed from stylized naturalism to abstract decoration and ultimately to a phase of simplification with the introduction of clearly defined planes and curved lines. Little is known about the later phase of his career.
