SERRURIER-BOVY, Gustave
Belgian cabinet designer and architect. He studied architecture at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Liège from 1874. He was mainly interested in the theories of John Ruskin and William Morris, but above all in those of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. From 1882, he practised as an architect with his father, Louis Serrurier, a contractor, and built the Gothic Revival chapel (1882) at the Château de Chaityfontaine (between Liège and Verviers). Soon, however, he was devoting all his time to furniture design.
In 1884, he went to London to visit the Schools of Handicrafts, Fine and Applied Arts. In the same year, he married Maria Bovy, an invaluable assistant, whose name he added to his own. The Serrurier-Bovy firm opened in Liège, selling imported objects and designing unique pieces of furniture. Its first important public showing was (probably due to intervention of Serrurier-Bovy’s friend Henry van de Velde) at the first salon of the Libre Esthétique, organized in Brussels by Octave Maus in February 1894. Serrurier-Bovy produced a complete set of furniture, a ‘cabinet de travail’, followed in 1895 by the ‘chambre d’artisan’, where Arts and Crafts and Gothic Revival influences were combined. This brought him clients from the Belgian intelligentsia. In 1895, he organized L’Oeuvre artistique in Liège, an exhibition in which applied art predominated. In 1897, with Paul Hankar, Georges Hobé (1854-1936) and van de Velde, he helped set up the Exposition Congolese at Tervuren, part of the Exposition Internationale in Brussels that sanctioned the Art Nouveau style in Belgium.
The lyricism of Serrurier-Bovy’s furniture was integral to its structure and never overdone. It combined the ‘truth to materials’ of the Arts and Crafts Movement with the sinuous line and decorative flourish of Art Nouveau ( example in Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). His studios and shop were both in Liège, with branches in Brussels and The Hague. A visit to the artists’ colony at Darmstadt in 1901 brought him closer to the Vienna Secession. In 1902 he attended an international design and industry exhibition in Düsseldorf; as a result, he moved away from a curvilinear style towards Art Deco in his designs. This can be seen in his furniture for the Château de la Chapelle-en-Serval near Compiègne, and the complete transformation of a country house called La Cheyrelle at Dienne in the Auvergne.
From 1902 he worked on his own villa, L’Aube, at Cointe in Liège. Meanwhile, he was president of L’Avant-garde, a group uniting artists, writers and men of science, the avant-garde of Liège. At the Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Liège (1905), he created some very original pieces for a typical worker’s house: this low-cost wooden furniture prefigured do-it-yourself kits.
Serrurier-Bovy made his last public appearance at the Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Brussels (1910) with a pavilion that he had designed and furnished. His firm was liquidated in 1918.
