Armand Albert Rateau

For the fully realized vanity:

Yvonne Brunhammer, Le Style 1925, Paris, 1975, pp. 40-41

“The Loan Exhibition from the Paris Exhibition,” Good Furniture Magazine, April 1926, pl. 187

Victor Arwas, Art Deco, London, 1980, p. 82 

Alastair Duncan, Art Deco Furniture: The French Designers, New York, 1984, p. 147

Jean-Paul Bouillon, Art Deco: 1903- 1940, New York, 1989, p. 123

AA Rateau, Delorenzo Gallery, New York, 1990, pp. 15 (for a period photograph of the vanity in the bedroom of Jeanne Lanvin), 26 and 61

Franck Olivier-Vial and Francois Rateau, Armand-Albert Rateau, Paris, 1992, pp. 37 and 40-41

Hélène Guéné, Décoration et Haute Couture; Armand-Albert Rateau pour Jeanne Lanvin, un autre Art déco, Paris, 2006, pp. 129, 131 and 153

Alastair Duncan, Art Deco Complete, New York, 2009, p. 76

The model for the present bird ornament was originally designed by Armand-Albert Rateau as part of French couturier Jeanne Lanvin’s vanity table in 1921. The pair of birds, facing symmetrically back-to-back, were positioned between the black and white marble top and the circular mirror above. The present ornament features an opening on top of each of the birds, and while it is not known what larger object it had once been a part of, it can be assumed that a mirror had been placed on top of it at one time.

Two examples of the vanity table are known to exist: the one designed for Jeanne Lanvin is in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and a second one was sold at Sotheby’s New York December 6, 2022. It is conceivable that a third vanity table exists, of which the present bird ornament may have been a part.