LOUIS MAJORELLE (France, 1859 - 1926) Art noveau tea table, circa 1900. Wood. Measurements: 83 x 92 x 57 cm. The structure and typology of great elegance, is made of wood. The tops are marked with a combination of different woods and express an almost obsessive love of plants and animals, a real symbolic scene where nature reappears in the grain, in the softness of the material and in the different woods representing leaves, stems, hazel flowers... in fact, nature freely evoked by the richness and variety of the living forms. A cabinetmaker and designer who was a member of the Nancy School, of which he was even vice-president, Louis Majorelle was the son of a furniture designer and manufacturer based in Toul, from where he moved to Nancy with his family. Majorelle received his first artistic training there and then went to Paris in 1877, where he studied for two years at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where his teacher was Jean-François Millet. However, the death of his father forced him to return to Nancy to run the family earthenware and furniture factory, a task he would combine with his artistic practice for the rest of his life. In the 1980s and until the early 1990s, Majorelle produced Louis XV-style furniture in the family firm, which he took to the 1894 Exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Nancy. There, however, he was able to see at first hand the works of Émile Gallé, whose influence would determine a radical change in Majorelle's production. From then on, his work was characterised by the use of naturalistic elements in his forms and marquetry. From the nineteen-nineties onwards, his furniture became fully Art Nouveau, with intertwined forms and a clear direct inspiration from nature, with motifs such as plants, water lilies, the typical Nancy thistle and the dragonfly, an icon of French modernism. In 1900, he went a step further and set up a forge workshop in his factory, in order to be able to make iron fittings in accordance with his designs. Over time, this became more important and he was responsible for the staircase handrails and the exterior details of many of Nancy's buildings.