The Jewelry of Royalty

 

QUESTION: I recently saw an exquisite brooch made by Cartier at a charity antique show. I always associated Cartier with fine watches. Can you tell me more about Cartier and how the company got its start in the jewelry making business?

ANSWER: While most people associate the name Cartier with fine watches, the company actually began repairing fine jewelry and later creating it. 

Louis-François Cartier founded Cartier in Paris in 1847 when he took over the workshop of his master, Adolphe Picard. In 1874, Louis-François' son Alfred Cartier took over the company, but it was Alfred's sons, Louis, Pierre and Jacques, who set up their own design and manufacturing operation and established the brand name worldwide.

Louis ran the Paris branch, moving to the Rue de la Paix in 1899. He was responsible for some of the company's most celebrated designs and exotic orientalist Art Deco jewelry, including the colorful "Tutti Frutti" jewels.

Cartier has had a long history of sales to royalty. King Edward VII of Great Britain referred to Cartier as "the jeweler of kings and the king of jewelers" For his coronation in 1902, Edward VII ordered 27 tiaras and issued a royal warrant to Cartier in 1904. Similar warrants soon followed from the courts of Spain, Portugal, Russia and the House of Orleans.

The firm had always had an illustrious clientele, including Henri and Maurice de Rothschilde, Ira Nelson Morris, Florence Blumenthal, Daisy Fellowes, Mrs. Cole Porter and Barbara Streisand.

The Cartier style was diverse, encompassing fashion accessories, as well as jewelry. It was a style which owed less to the prevailing design trends and more to the global travels and interests of the Cartier brothers and their intrigue with novelty. Their pioneering use of the much stronger platinum instead of silver, as a setting for diamonds made it possible to work in such a thin gauge that the diamonds seem to float in space in an intricate embroidery.

Attention to detail saw even the ring bolt catches studded with minute diamonds, and seed pearls on a tasseled pendant exquisitely graded in size.

But Cartier made its jewelry to be adaptable. One diamond fern spray brooch could also be a long corsage, a necklace or a tiara. A central jeweled motif could be removed from a necklace and placed in a brooch setting which, with a tiny screw-driver, was packaged beneath the velvet of its padded box. Long necklaces, known as sautoirs, sometimes contained pendant watches and could be lengthened or shortened, even turned into Brooches were made to be divided, if desired, for wearing on each shoulder.

Pierre Cartier established the New York City branch in 1909, moving in 1917 to 653 Fifth Avenue, the Neo-Renaissance mansion of Morton Freeman Plant (son of railroad tycoon Henry B. Plant) and designed by architect C.P.H. Gilbert. Cartier bought it from the Plants in exchange for $100 in cash and a double-stranded natural pearl necklace valued at the time at $1 million. By this time, Cartier had branches in London, New York and Saint Petersburg. 

By 1910, Cartier had found another medium to work with-pieces of rock crystal, a colorless, hard stone which was carved with foliate scrollwork. Always open to experimenting with materials, the jewelers began using blackened steel as a setting for rubies and diamonds in 1913. 

When the firm started to design its own jewelry, the Art Nouveau style of flowing, floral lines was at its peak. But Cartier chose to look back to historical Renaissance or Neoclassical architectural ornamentation for inspiration. A pendant in the form of an Ionic column, for instance, with scrolls from ancient stonework, is a good example. Cartier had a simplicity of design work with geometric patterns.

A trip to St. Petersburg in 1914 through 1915 and the popularity in the west of Faberge, inspired Cartier's Russian period. The trip was essentially to sell diamond and platinum jewelry and to purchase Russian enameled, gold objets d'art, but a year later Cartier had produced its own Russian style pieces and began exhibiting regularly in Russia, selling pieces to Russian nobility.

After the Russian Revolution, many of Faberge's American and European followers switched to Cartier, and this style continued to be produced until the 1920s.

The overseas influence set a trend in Cartier design. The brothers' admiration of the past led to ancient designs from Egypt, Persia, India, China and Japan being reworked in a modern way. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 unleashed worldwide Egyptomania. Cartier produced pieces, such as a vanity box in the form of a sarcophagus. Designers looked to source books and museums, such as the Louvre and the British Museum, for inspiration. 

The collecting instincts of the Cartiers was evident in the way they included ancient fragments in their pieces, such as in a winged scarab brooch which included blue glazed wing pieces which would have been found on the chest of a mummy.

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Linking the Past With the Present

QUESTION:  I purchased a pair of antique finger pronged cufflinks stamped, "Pat. 2 Dec. 1884" a while back on eBay. Can you tell me more about these cuff links?  The cuff links are finger pronged and clearly marked on the back, "Pat. 2nd Dec 84" although there’s no brand name. I did some research and found out that finger prongs first came into style in 1885, so I presume the date is 1884. I also wonder about the carnelian. If it’s not stone, could it be molded glass?

ANSWER:  Cufflinks are one of the few accepted items in a limited line of men’s jewelry. No other collectible causes such an array of reactions. And this is precisely why so many people collect cuff links. Other reasons are their relatively inexpensive cost, easy storage, and availability. A search through virtually any antiquing site attests to the seemingly endless styles, shapes and designs produced in the last 200 years.

Cufflinks, which are small, and spend most of their lives under coat sleeves or in drawers, are  pieces of adornment which have much to say about society and about the individual who wears them. They mirror the fashions, the economy, the manufacturing and the art of their era, usually  larger and more colorful in good times, smaller and more conservative in bad times.

Cuff links originated long ago as removable buttons for shirts and jackets. When buttons became mass-produced and cheap enough to sew onto the material itself, men used these little studs only at the cuffs. The variety of cufflinks increased dramatically with mass production techniques. Of course, the need for cufflinks increased, too. Every member of the peerage, as well as every business man who wanted to socialize in high society, had to wear "tails" at every dinner party and evening activity. And tails required a shirt with French cuffs.

The earliest cuff links date from the same period as the cuff-fastening slit. Handmade of various metals, usually gold and silver, and set with gemstones, they became a luxury for the wealthy.

Hand-casting and other manual jewelry-making techniques continued until 1840 to 1870 when three mechanical developments—the tour a’guilloche machine, the steam driven stamping machine, and electro metallurgy—opened up men’s jewelry to a much wider clientele. The French or double-cuff shirt sleeve also became a popular fashion accessory in the 1840s.

After 1840, cufflinks were affordable. Victorian lucky charms, hearts, flowers, love birds, ivy, love knots, angels, snakes, even babies found their way to cufflinks of the era. As did the horseshoe. Horse racing was a passion of Edward, Prince of Wales and many commoners apparently liked the idea of linking themselves and their shirt sleeves to royalty through this symbol.  Cufflink makers employed free-flowing whiplash lines, organic motifs and stunning, romantic feminine figures and faces during the Art Nouveau period.

The publication of Alexander Dumas’ novel The Three Musketeers in 1844 stimulated this new elegant touch in fashion, as detailed descriptions of the turned-back sleeves of the men guarding King Louis XIII inspired European designers to modify the single cuffed, link-holed shirtsleeve that had been the mainstay of English fashion since 1824.

The English middle class adopted cuff links during the reign of George IV, toward the end of the Industrial Revolution. Unable to afford gemstones, they turned to replicas of the real thing. Designers used “rhinestones” and pastes to represent diamonds, pinchbeck, a copper and zinc alloy, as a substitute for gold, and cut steel and marcasite as a substitute for silver.

Late Georgian and Victorian jewelers favored a rose or flat cut for real or fake gemstones. They typically used foil or paste, a type of leaded glass, for backings.

Reverse intaglio was also a popular way of embellishing 19th century cuff links. After carving a figure or scene in great detail into the back of a cabochon crystal, an artisan would carefully fill in the work with paint and apply a mother of pearl backing. Manufacturers used this elegant process almost exclusively for jewelry worn by men.

Cuff link makers used this same process to carve designs, often of classical gods, into carnelian, a brownish-red mineral, which gets its deep rust color from impurities of iron oxide in the silica mineral chalcedony, commonly found in Brazil, India, Siberia, and Germany. Used as a semi-precious gemstone, its color can vary greatly, ranging from pale orange to an intense dark rust.

Men favored enameled cuff links during the late Georgian period, but it was during the Art Deco period that enamels reached their peak of popularity. Metal decorated with baked enamel— colored lumps of glass ground into a powder with a mortar and pestle—has been an art form since the 13th century.

Manufacturers of the 1950s arid 60's frequently marketed cuff links in a series, for example pairs featuring cars, sports themes, and so on. Various caricature cuff links, images of sports, political and theatrical celebrities were also popular during that time. One interesting category of cuff link is the "do-ers" category. As. the name implies, cuff links in this category do something in addition to fastening. Nail clippers, thermometers, music boxes, and watches have all been built into the links.

But the front design on cuff links is only have of the story. Fasteners on the backs have their own intriguing history. Late Georgian fastening devices featured wire loops, curb chains and string. Makers introduced the dumbbell form earlier in the mid-Georgian period in the late 18th century. Small and in one solid piece, craftsmen carved the dumbbell from ivory in the early part of the 19th century and by mid-century, from pearl. Carved dumbbells had a slightly curved shank. They looked like exercise weights whose ends were too heavy for the bar. Dumbbells of glass, coral, gold, gold plate and various hard stones became fashionable by the 1890s.

A metal button fastener, circa 1880, looked like an oversized shirt stud. Another, the "one-piece link" from the 1890s, continues to be produced today. It has a metal face, slightly curved fastening device and a metal oval to hold it fast to the inside of the cuff.

The patent, dated 1884 on the back of these cuff links, most likely refers to the closing mechanism. By that time celluloid collars and cuffs were popular. And since they were stiff, cufflinks with that mechanism would have been very compatible.

Generally, cuff links backs can be classified into the following groups: Flipbacks are turn-of-the-20th-century on English and Scandinavian ones; chain-backs are 18th, 19th, and 20th century until the 1920s and usually look like a big “S” or a figure; spring-backs date from the 1930s, 1940s, and later. All Swank cufflinks feature this sort of clasp.

As far as brands go, cuff link manufacturers didn’t begin to mark there products until somewhat into the 20th century.

Many collectors tend to specialize in cuff links from a particular era such as Art Deco, Victorian, or contemporary. Some prefer to concentrate on a theme like animals, sports or automobiles, while others look for novelty pairs incorporating watches, music boxes or other devices. With so many styles to choose from, most collectors concentrate on one particular type. Some look for a particular material, like silver, Bakelite, wood or brass, while others look for military issue, fraternal emblems or a particular era. Still others search for unique fastening devices like snaps or springs.

For more information, go to Button Down a Collection of Antique Cuff Links .