Art Nouveau Jewellery

Art Nouveau jewellery treated the whole piece as a small artwork built around flowing, organic line, valuing artistic imagination over the intrinsic worth of its materials at exactly the moment mainstream fashion was becoming more diamond-obsessed than ever.

Overview

Art Nouveau emerged in the 1890s as part of a wider decorative-arts movement spanning architecture, glass, furniture and graphic design, and reached jewellery with particular force in France. Its defining visual language was the sinuous, asymmetric “whiplash” curve - a line that seems to move rather than sit still - applied to plant stems, hair, insect wings and drapery alike. The style’s popularity was intense but comparatively brief, largely concentrated between about 1895 and 1910 before giving way to the very different geometric taste of Art Deco.

René Lalique and the Defining Figure of the Style

René Lalique is the designer most closely identified with Art Nouveau jewellery, celebrated for combining precious and non-precious materials with equal inventiveness and for treating enamel and glass as artistically significant as gemstones. His work, exhibited to acclaim at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, helped establish Art Nouveau jewellery as a serious art form rather than simply an alternative fashion, and his influence shaped a wider circle of French and Belgian jewellers working in a similar spirit.

Motifs

Insects - dragonflies, beetles, wasps and butterflies - recur constantly, prized for their iridescent colour and their fit with the style’s organic linework, alongside orchids, poppies, peacocks, and female figures often shown with flowing hair merging into the piece’s decorative line. Snake motifs also appear, rendered with a sinuous naturalism well suited to the style. These motifs were treated pictorially, almost as small sculptures or paintings, rather than as the small repeated symbolic devices typical of earlier Victorian sentimental jewellery.

Plique-à-Jour and Materials Valued for Artistic Effect

Plique-à-jour enamel - a technique producing panels of translucent colour unbacked by metal, so that light passes through them like a miniature stained-glass window - became closely associated with the style and was used to spectacular effect for wings, petals and drapery. Art Nouveau jewellers also worked freely with horn, carved and polished for its warm, translucent colour; moulded and coloured glass; ivory; and base metals, choosing materials for their artistic and expressive qualities rather than automatically reaching for gold, diamonds or other conventionally precious materials. Where ivory or horn from restricted species appears in historical Art Nouveau pieces, modern sale and import rules may apply regardless of the object’s age.

Contrast With Mainstream Jewellery of the Same Years

Art Nouveau developed in the same decades that platinum-set diamond jewellery, in the lighter, garland-influenced taste later called Edwardian, was becoming the dominant fashion among wealthy, conventional society in Britain and much of France. The two styles existed side by side rather than in sequence: Art Nouveau was, in large part, a deliberately artistic alternative to mainstream gem-focused fashion rather than a style that displaced it, and it remained a comparatively specialist, avant-garde taste even at its peak.

Common Jewellery Types

Pendants - frequently suspended from fine chains and treated as the piece’s main artistic statement - brooches, hair combs and hairpins, and the lavalier necklace form were all well suited to the style’s pictorial, sculptural approach.

Lalique’s Patrons and Paris Contemporaries

Lalique first showed jewellery under his own name at the Paris Salon in 1895. His greatest patron, the oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, built the largest collection of his jewellery, including the celebrated Dragonfly Woman corsage ornament of about 1897-98, now in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. The actress Sarah Bernhardt wore Lalique jewellery on and off stage.

Other Paris jewellers developed the style in their own ways:

• Georges Fouquet worked with the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha, who designed jewellery for him - including a serpent bracelet and ring for Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 - and the interior of Fouquet’s shop on the rue Royale, opened in 1901 and later reconstructed at the Musée Carnavalet.
• Henri Vever, head of an established family firm, made Art Nouveau jewels of great technical refinement and wrote a history of 19th-century French jewellery.
• Lucien Gaillard specialised in carved horn combs and hair ornaments influenced by Japanese art.
• Eugène Feuillâtre was a leading enameller, especially in plique-à-jour.

The style took its name from Siegfried Bing’s Paris shop, the Maison de l’Art Nouveau, which opened in 1895.

Beyond France

• Belgium: Philippe Wolfers in Brussels made outstanding Art Nouveau jewellery in ivory, enamel and gold.
• Germany: Jugendstil jewellery was produced in quantity in Pforzheim, notably by Theodor Fahrner, often in silver with enamel and semi-precious stones and at modest prices.
• Austria: the Wiener Werkstätte, founded in Vienna in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, made jewellery in a more geometric style that anticipated Art Deco.
• Britain: Liberty & Co. sold Art Nouveau-influenced silver and gold jewellery, especially the “Cymric” range launched in 1899, with designs by Archibald Knox and others drawing on Celtic interlace; Murrle, Bennett & Co. supplied similar work, much of it made in Pforzheim. The boundary with Arts and Crafts jewellery is often blurred; see Art Nouveau vs Arts and Crafts.
• United States: Tiffany & Co. and Marcus & Co. made enamelled and opal-set naturalistic jewellery, and Newark firms such as Unger Brothers and William B. Kerr mass-produced stamped silver brooches, buckles and hatpins with Art Nouveau women and flowers.

Mass-Market Art Nouveau

The style’s motifs travelled far beyond the art jewellers. Stamped silver and gilt-metal brooches, belt buckles, cloak clasps and hatpins with flowing hair, poppies and lilies were made cheaply in Birmingham, Pforzheim and Newark for a wide market. These pieces are often charming and are true period pieces, but they are die-stamped rather than hand-modelled and rarely use plique-à-jour.

How to Recognise Art Nouveau Jewellery

Asymmetric, flowing curved lines, insect or female-figure motifs treated pictorially, plique-à-jour or other artistic enamelling, and the deliberate use of horn, glass or ivory alongside or instead of precious materials are all strong indicators of the style.

Transition to Art Deco

Art Nouveau’s popularity faded quickly after about 1910, overtaken by a public and design taste turning toward the symmetry, geometric clarity and machine-age confidence of Art Deco jewellery, a reaction almost the direct opposite of Art Nouveau’s organic asymmetry.