Rene Lalique at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

The worlds largest collection of jewellery, art objects, artistic glass and drawings by René Lalique. Calouste Gulbenkian (1869-1955), the famous Portuguese collector, was a friend of René Lalique for 50 years and a great connoisseur of the various activities of this versatile artist. Between 1899 and 1927 Calouste Gulbenkian acquired 80 extraordinary works of art directly from the artist; these are conserved today in an exclusive space inside the Calouste Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon.

Maria Fernanda Passos Leite is chief curator of the textile and RenT Lalique collections at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. She is the author of Cartier 1899–1949: The Journey of a Style (Skira, 2007).