The name Gabriel Argy-Rousseau appeared for the first time in 1914 at the Exposition des Artistes Française in Paris. Critics and the public alike responded enthusiastically to his debut and recognized the artist’s originality, the idiosyncrasies of his work, and his extraordinary talent at working the little known and little practiced material of pâte de verre (glass paste). Argy-Rousseau himself recognized that "the process of creating ‘pâte de verre’ is certainly the most artistic and the most personal of all the methods of working in glass and crystal because it allows the artist to easily convey all his thoughts. But exactly who was this unknown artist who suddenly stepped forward 10 years after the death of Emile Gallé and during a period in which modern art had not yet made its mark on the applied arts, which were still dominated by the Art Nouveau style?
Gabriel Argy-Rousseau, whose real name is Joseph Gabriel Rousseau, was born in 1885 under very modest circumstances. He entered the Ecole Nationale de Sèvres in 1902 and it was his training during this formative period that would influence and shape his career as an artist. This included, above all, his introduction to pâte de verre thanks to Jean Cros, his classmate and the son of Henri Cros, the artist who essentially rediscovered pâte de verre at the end of the 19th century. Argy-Rousseau left the school four years later with a diploma in ceramic engineering. He subsequently set up his own studio and began to show his first works in 1914 under the pseudonym Gabriel Argy-Rousseau, having married the sister of his friend Plato Argyriades.
In 1923, he partnered with a major Paris gallery to found the company `Les Pâte de Verre d’Argy-Rousseau’.Within fifteen years, he created some 300 models that included vases, lamps, lanterns, and bowls, a number of which can be considered masterpieces. The 1929 economic crisis, however, significantly slowed his production and the company was ultimately dissolved in 1931