Daum Nancy "Bat" Vase

This exquisite orange and black Chauve-Souris (“Bat”) vase by Daum Frères depicts a flight of bats silhouetted against a textured rose-colored ground evocative of sunset. The bats are rendered in acid-etched cameo decoration—a technique in which surrounding layers of glass are etched away to leave the design in relief—with details further refined by wheel carving. Long before their adoption by Art Nouveau artists, bats entered the European decorative vocabulary through eighteenth-century Chinese export wares. In China, the bat was an auspicious emblem because the word for bat, fu (蝠), is a homophone of fu (福), meaning happiness or good fortune. By the late nineteenth century, however, European Symbolist artists had recast the bat as a creature of twilight and the night, associated with dreams, the unconscious, and the darker recesses of the psyche. Its nocturnal character made it particularly resonant within Art Nouveau, a movement closely intertwined with the visual culture of fin-de-siècle nightlife. Bats consequently appeared not only in the decorative arts but also as atmospheric emblems for theaters, cabarets, nightclubs, and restaurants, where their shadowy silhouettes evoked the seductive world that emerged after dark.