Léon Jallot (1874 – 1967) French designer and artisan

Léon Jallot (1874 – 1967) was a French designer and artisan. He also worked in fabrics, interior design, and architecture.

Biography

In 1880 he started making furniture. Natural wood was used in this earlier design, often carved with embellishments in the style of late-eighteenth-century French provincial furniture. Between the wars, he continued to build enormous, ambitious works with elaborate cabinets, a practice he continued in an Art Deco manner.

1898-1901, was manager of Siegfried Bing’s furniture shop in Paris’s Maison de l’Art Nouveau.

In 1901, he became a founding member of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs’ first Salon.

In 1903, he opened his decorating studio. He crafted and made furniture, fabrics, carpets, tapestries, glassware, lacquer, and screens; rabbeted woods were his speciality.

He built his own home and the home of painter André Derain on rue du Douanier in Paris.

Linearity

He was the first to turn away from Art Nouveau’s excessive floral ornamentation and to advocate linearity. In 1904, when the grain of the wood was his only decoration, rich, not overworked materials were championed to suggest luxury.

He designed a wide range of furniture and furnishings from 1921 with his son Maurice. His furniture was simple in design, with flat surfaces lacquered, painted, or covered in shagreen or leather.

The Jallots began in the 1920s their work with synthetic materials and metal. Favre was in charge of selling Léon’s traditional light fixtures. Jean Perzel, G. Fabre, and Eugene Capon designed the interior fixtures for his and Maurice’s rooms after c1927, when they started to design rooms with almost exclusively indirect lighting. For the 1920 Salon of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs, the Jallots created fluted columns lit from within and a peripherally illuminated pelmet for the 1928 Hotel Radio (including interiors and restaurant by Maurice), boulevard de Clichy, Paris.

Additional Works

Sources

Byars, M., & Riley, T. (2004). The design encyclopedia. Laurence King Publishing.

Miller, J., & Dawes, N. M. (2005). Art Deco: The Complete Visual Reference and price guide. DK.

Art Deco from our Bookshop

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