J Fremont Explores Life of Rene Lalique in 'Magician of Light'

J Fremont’s historical novel, Magician of Light, tells the story of renowned French jeweler and glass designer, Rene Lalique. “He was just such a prolific artist that you could just go on and on and on about everything that he did and so that was one thing when I wrote this is I had to, kind of, pick and choose what I wanted to talk about… the novel became more about his personal life than really, than his work, because there’s been so many books written about his work but he initially was a jeweler and then transformed into a glass maker when he was about 50 and he became a master, he was considered a master, in both of these aspects of the decorative arts. He was pretty phenomenal in that sense.. He really started his career at 16…from 16 until he was like 80 or so, I mean, most people don’t work that long. His work spanned like three of what are arguably the most significant periods in the decorative arts… it was really a long span of time… he was still doing stuff.”

Fremont also explained what drew her into writing about Lalique. “I was actually creating stories for my blog and I had written some other stuff. I was working on some other writing pieces and I had started to research for a novel about ancient Egypt and what happened was I had this dream one night about meeting this guy sitting in a chair behind a counter and he was talking to me…when I woke up, I’m like, ok, who was this guy? And then he appeared to me again in a dream three months later and he actually told me to promote him. I was to write a book and promote him…and then another six weeks and I was like, who is this guy and why is he haunting me? And then about eighteen months after the first dream, one of the people that I was researching in ancient Egypt was Thutmose III.. and one of the things that Thutmose did…what he would do is he’d bring back artisans to Egypt and then learn all their ways of stuff, how they made stuff, and so glass making really became elevated during that time…and I stumbled across Lalique’s picture on the Internet and it was exactly how I saw him in that first dream, the way he was dressed and sitting… I just figured out who this mystery man is and then ultimately, as I delved into get to know him, then he became the story, and Thutmose and his friends actually became another story.”

As far as seeing Lalique’s work, Fremont had initially planned a trip to Lisbon, Portugal, to the Gulbenkian Museum to see Lalique’s famous jewelry, but the trip was canceled due to COVID. Fortunately, she has plans to visit New York this fall, where she looks forward to experiencing New York’s fall colors with her husband and seeing all the deciduous trees there that she never gets to see in California. In addition, “we’re going to go to the Corning Museum of Glass. They have a rather large collection that was donated to them and so we’re going to go check those out.”