thumb|right|Crystal vase from Val Saint Lambert|170px
Val Saint Lambert is a Belgian crystal glassware manufacturer, founded in 1826 and based in Seraing. It has the royal warrant of King Albert II.
Earlier glassworks
In 1795 during the War of the First Coalition which brought about the fall of the Dutch Republic, France had annexed what was then termed the Southern Netherlands, now known as Belgium. During the period of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1802 Napoleon Bonaparte asked French industrialist Henri D'Artigues to leave the noted French crystal maker Saint-Louis to buy the dilapidated glassworks at Vonêche. Like Saint-Louis, Vonêche produced lead crystal glass, and within ten years had become the most important crystal producer in the French empire. Two of the key workers in the plant's success were chemist François Kemlin and engineer Auguste Lelièvre. In 1815 following Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the Southern Netherlands was re-united within the new United Kingdom of the Netherlands. As a result of newly imposed import duties, the Vonêche factory immediately lost most of its French market. In 1816, D'Artigues negotiated with King Louis XVIII of France to buy the Verrerie de St Anne glassworks in the town of Baccarat, and renamed it the Verrerie de Vonêche à Baccarat – a name it kept until 1843. The Belgian Revolution of 1830 meant that the Vonêche glassworks also lost most of its Southern Holland market, and hence closed soon afterwards.
History
In 1825 Kemlin and Lelièvre bought the site of the former Val-Saint-Lambert Abbey in Seraing near Liège on the river Meuse. There they founded a new glassworks, originally focused on heavy lead crystal), which initially employed some of the key workers from the former Vonêche glassworks. The resulting "bright period" expanded the companies reputation and market especially in North America, and hence today it is well known and collected there for its Art Nouveau and Art Deco pieces. In 1894 at the world exhibition in Antwerp, the company manufactured an over 2 metres high vase consisting of 82 parts and weighing 200 kilograms, which is still intact and now on display at the Curtius Museum in Liège. As the company became more successful – at its height in the period 1900–1914, it employed over 5,000 workers creating 120,000 pieces of glass per day – the company contracted out work to other factories, latterly either buying them or opening new factories, including: Jemeppe (1883 to 1952); two near Namur (1879 to 1935); and Jambes (1880 to 1931, producing oil glass lamps).