Jean Dunand Biography

Jean Dunand (1877-1942) was a Swiss and French painter, sculptor, metal craftsman and interior designer during the Art Deco period. He was particularly known for his lacquered screens and other art objects.

Dunand was born in Lancy, Switzerland and later adopted the French first name of Jean when he became a naturalised French citizen in 1922. At the age of fourteen, he began studying sculpture at the Geneva School of Industrial Arts, where he won several prizes and received his diploma. In 1897 he moved to Paris and began to work as a sculptor and a copper craftsman.

He worked with a very wide range of materials, including steel, copper, pewter and silver, which he worked with hammer and gilded and encrusted with gold or mother-of-pearl, and then often decorated with enamels and patinas. His works included vases, plates, boxes, and jewelry.

In about 1912, he began working with Seizo Sugawara, a Japanese lacquer painter who had emigrated to France, and began to use that ancient and almost forgotten technique in his own work, making large decorative panels and screens. He also sometimes decorated pieces of furniture by other designers, including Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann and Pierre Legrain. His themes were greatly varied, from floral and animal designs, to a kind of neo-cubism, and oriental designs.

For the 1925 Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts, he worked on one of his best-known exhibits, a proposal for the interior of an Art Deco French Embassy, creating a smoking room entirely decorated in lacquered panels. He also contributed to Ruhlmann's House of a Collector. He contributed to the interiors of many apartments, and of ocean liners; he decorated the smoking room of the ocean liner SS Normandie.

He died on 7 June 1942 in Paris.