Rene Lalique was one of the giants of twentieth-century decorative arts. Born in 1860, early artistic talent led to an apprenticeship with Paris goldsmith Louis Aucoc. By 1885, Rene had established his own workshop and for the next twenty years he designed and made jewelry of great originality and beauty. He became famous across the world for his jewelry, but before the turn of the century he began experimenting with glass. It is for his glass that Lalique is most famous today.
In 1907, Lalique met the perfume manufacturer Francois Coty, and this led to the design and production of fine art perfume bottles on a grand scale. But Lalique's glass would not be confined to ladies' dressing tables, his repertoire including vases, lighting, clocks, car mascots, several architectural commissions and more, much of it in the Art Deco idiom, of which Lalique was one of the masters. Rene Lalique died in 1945, but the firm he founded was continued by his son Marc, and then his daughter Marie-Claude who heads the firm today.
This highly illustrated history of Lalique celebrates the extraordinary jewelry and glass of Rene Lalique, and the glass of the Lalique company up to the present day.

Although usually associated with the 1920s and '30s, the Art Deco style had already begun to emerge in France prior to the First World War. However, it was during the interwar years that the style, reaching full maturity, would be embraced across the world as the ultimate expression of modernity, elegance and refined taste. Art Deco design is redolent of the Jazz Age, conjuring images of society cocktail parties, the Charleston and Hollywood in this great but doomed era of excess. But this was also an age that saw momentous technological advances in engineering and transportation, and Art Deco is a feature, too, of the streamlined profiles of high-speed trains, ocean liners, and aircraft. Here, TV antiques expert Eric Knowles provides a lavishly illustrated personal narrative and guide to this most alluring and enduring of styles.

The story of English furniture really begins in the sixteenth century, when the crudities of medieval domestic tables and stools gave way to more sophisticated, jointed designs. This Tudor furniture is the earliest to survive in any quantity and it is where John Bly's classic history of English furniture sets out on its journey of illumination.
Over the years, changing fashions, influences from around the world, different materials and developing manufacturing techniques have all had an impact on English furniture, causing it to change over the decades, sometimes quite suddenly. Each of these changes is fully explained, along with studies of completely new types of furniture as they appear in the story. Oak gives way to walnut, and then mahogany, and over the course of the Eighteenth century furniture becomes finer and more formal and the great names - Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite - emerge and shine a light that takes the story to the next stage.
This brand-new, full-color edition of a classic text traces the story up to the twentieth century, with a new coverage of Art Deco furniture by Eric Knowles. It concludes with a masterclass in detecting alterations and fakery that can significantly affect the worth of a piece of furniture. An invaluable tool for the collector, and a delight for the museum visitor, this book is the only one you will need to gain a thorough grounding in the fascinating subject of English furniture.