Raymond Branlé Antique Vase, Vintage-style Bottle, Biot Master Glassmaker, Orange

A beautiful, decorative blown-glass vase, signed by master glassmaker Raymond Branlé in Biot, notable for its organic form and its rich interplay of texture and color.

The spherical body, blown using a glass rod, features thick glass walls in shades of amber, orange, and purple. The glass mass is enlivened by iridescent hues and internal movements achieved through the layering of colored layers, inclusions, and hot-fusion effects.

The body is entirely punctuated by hot-applied glass elements: tubular protrusions, discs, cabochons, and elongated appendages evoking corollas, tentacles, or marine forms. These elements, applied to the still-incandescent body, are then pinched, stretched, and shaped with glassblowing tongs. Their color palette combines turquoise blue, violet, purple, amber-yellow, and red, creating vivid contrasts with the orange background.

The neck, with a slightly frosted and satiny finish, rises in a tapered, undulating shape. It is fitted with a removable stopper made of transparent glass—either molded or hot-worked—whose twisted silhouette evokes a flame, a crystal, or a mineral formation. The stopper is secured in the neck by a ground cylindrical section.

The base bears the characteristic marks of hand-blown craftsmanship, with a concentrated mass of glass and an irregular bottom resulting from manual fabrication. Every distortion, variation in thickness, and small internal bubble bears witness to the hot-forming process and constitutes a unique characteristic of the object. This complex work employs several glassmaking techniques and demonstrates the artist’s mastery of form and color.

This piece is part of the Biot artistic glass movement of the second half of the 20th century, in which glass became a sculptural, expressive, and free-form material, straddling the boundaries between vases, bottles, and decorative sculpture.

Artist: Signed Raymond Branlé
Place of production: Biot, Alpes-Maritimes
Period: Second half of the 20th century
Technique: Glassblowing with rods, hot-formed glass, applied polychrome elements, pulled and pinched
Decoration: cabochons, tubular protrusions, and organic forms
Colors: orange, amber, purple, turquoise blue, red, and clear glass
Total height: 25 cm
Composition: bottle and stopper
Condition: very good overall condition, no chips or cracks; slight irregularities and bubbles due to the artisanal manufacturing process