Rare set of 9 Bulles glasses by Roger Tallon for Daum, from the 3T serie, 1960s.

Roger Tallon was a French Industrial designer. After studying as an engineer (1944–50), Tallon was employed by Caterpillar France and DuPont. In 1953, he joined Technès, the technical and aesthetic studies office founded in 1949 by the father of industrial aesthetics, Jacques Viénot and Jean Parthenay. Being rapidly promoted to the technical and artistic director at the agency, he became the sole director after Viénot's death in 1959. In 1957, he enrolled at the École des Arts Appliqués (School of Applied Arts) in Paris and put in place the first design course in the country. In 1963, he set up the Design Department of the École Nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. As a consultant for the US company General Electric, Tallon designed refrigerators and washing machines and set up the Design Department of the American company. In 1966, the Téléavia P111 portable television was put on the market against the advice of the Board. It broke the mould of TV design and was a commercial success with a cult following. In 1973, Tallon set up agency Design Programmes. Brother-in-arms with the LIP watchmakers, he created the Mach 2000 brand of watches and chronometers. In 1974, with Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, he created a concept aircraft cabin for Air France. After leaving Euro RSCG, he continued to work independently. Tallon died on 20th October 2011, after a long period of sickness.

For collectors, Daum is a name in the first rank of the French makers of art glass, along with those of Émile Gallé and René Lalique. Led in its early decades by the brothers Auguste (1853–1909) and Antonin Daum (1864–1931), the company, based in the city of Nancy, established its reputation in the Art Nouveau period, and later successfully adopted the Art Deco style.

In 1878, lawyer Jean Daum took over the ownership of a glassworks as payment for a debt and installed his sons as proprietors. Initially, Daum made glass for everyday purposes such as windows, watches and tableware, but the success that Gallé enjoyed at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris — the international showcase for which the Eiffel Tower was built — inspired the Daum brothers to begin making art-glass pieces. They produced popular works of cameo glass, a decorative technique in which an outer layer of glass is acid-etched or carved off to reveal the layer below, but Daum became best known for vessels and sculptures in pâte de verre — a painstaking method in which finely ground colored glass is mixed with a binder, placed in a mold and then fired in a kiln. 

Though early Daum glass was never signed by individual artists, the firm employed some of the masters of the naturalistic, asymmetrical Art Nouveau style, including Jacques Grüber, Henri Bergé and Amalric Walter (whose first name is frequently misspelled). Daum also collaborated with furniture and metalware designer Louis Majorelle, who created wrought-iron and brass mounts for vases and table lamps. In the 1960s, Daum commissioned fine artists, most notably Salvador Dalí and sculptor César Baldaccini, to design glass pieces. As you see from the works offered on 1stDibs, Daum has been home to an astonishingly rich roster of creative spirits and is today a state-owned enterprise making pâte de verre figurines.