Lily of the Valley Comb (c. 1900): Art, History and Details

Lily of the Valley Comb (c. 1900) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is René Lalique (French, 1860–1945).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This comb was purchased by Cleveland native Jeptha Homer Wade II from Lalique after admiring the designer's work at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, probably for his wife Ellen Garretson Wade. Pearlescent horn forms the leaves of the lily of the valley, out of which the delicate, bell-shaped enamel flowers emerge.

Object facts

• Title: Lily of the Valley Comb
• Date: c. 1900
• Creator attribution: René Lalique (French, 1860–1945)
• Culture: France, early 20th Century
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: horn, enamel and gold
• Dimensions: Overall: 15.4 x 9.4 x 3 cm (6 1/16 x 3 11/16 x 1 3/16 in.)
• Collection: Decorative Arts
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1981.49

A detail from the museum

Lalique valued the use of horn for its transparent qualities and natural color.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lalique, René, Yvonne Brunhammer, and Sigrid Barten. The Jewels of Lalique. New York: Flammarion, 1998.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1981.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 2 (February 1982): 39–82.
• Harrison, Stephen, Emmanuel Ducamp, Jeannine J Falino. Artistic Luxury: Fabergé Tiffany Lalique. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art in association with New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.