Gilbert Poillerat

Gilbert Poillerat was born at Mer, in the Loir-et-Cher, in 1902 and trained at the École Boulle in Paris as an engraver and chaser, graduating in 1921. He went straight to the workshops of Edgar Brandt, the leading ironworker of the Art Deco years, where he spent six years as a designer and model-maker, and in 1927 took charge of the ironwork department of the building firm Baudet, Donon et Roussel. From there came the work that made his name: gates, balustrades, consoles, screens and lighting in wrought and gilded iron for the liner Normandie, the Palais de l’Élysée, the Ministry of Finance, the Mobilier National and the great private houses of the 1930s and 1940s.

His manner, calligraphic scrolls and arabesques in the 1930s, a lighter neoclassicism after the war, defined French decorative ironwork for three decades, and his furniture is today among the most sought-after of the period.

Poillerat was also a painter, a designer of jewellery and medals and, in his last years, a printmaker: etchings and mezzotints of still lifes, cats, masks and hourglasses, many of them made as New Year’s cards for friends and signed and dated in pencil. He taught at the École nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs and was made an Officier of the Légion d’honneur. He died in Paris in 1988; the monograph ‘Gilbert Poillerat, maître ferronnier’ by François Baudot appeared in 1998.