This family cutler, founded in Paris in 1820 by Emile Puiforcat and his two cousins, owes most of its renown to Jean Puiforcat, from the fourth generation of the family, who was to write the most beautiful pages of its history almost a century later, and would establish the company in the avant-garde of modern silverwork. Driven by his father, louis-Victor Puiforcat, the company began evolving towards the high-end of the silversmith’s trade in the late nineteenth century, recreating eighteenth-century masterpieces from his collection that are now exhibited at the louvre museum in Paris. His son Jean was named a master silversmith in 1920. Immersed in the wave of artistic change that characterised the period between the wars, he was one of the founders of the Union des artistes modernes in 1929, and was a friend of René Herbst, le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Chareau. He was passionate about sculpture and invented a revolu-tionary formal language that advocated adapting form to suit func-tion.