Moonstone in Art Nouveau Jewellery

Moonstone is a pale, translucent feldspar valued for adularescence - a soft, glowing, bluish-white sheen that appears to float beneath the stone’s surface as it is turned - and it became one of the defining gemstones of Art Nouveau jewellery in the years around 1900.

What Moonstone Is

Moonstone is a variety of feldspar, usually orthoclase. As the crystal cooled, two feldspars separated into extremely thin alternating layers, and light scattered by these layers produces the floating sheen. Thin layers give a blue sheen, prized as the finest; thicker layers give a whiter, milkier glow. The term adularescence comes from adularia, a name for this kind of feldspar taken from the Adula mountains in Switzerland. Moonstone is relatively soft and has two directions of easy cleavage, so old stones often show chips and scratches on their domes.

An Otherworldly Quality

Moonstone’s appeal to Art Nouveau jewellers lay less in intrinsic monetary worth than in atmosphere. The Art Nouveau movement favoured materials valued for artistic and symbolic effect over sheer brilliance or costliness, drawing on motifs of moonlight, water, dreams and the natural world, and moonstone’s soft, shifting glow suited this sensibility precisely. Unlike a faceted diamond or sapphire, moonstone does not flash or sparkle; its effect is quiet and atmospheric, which is why designers working in this style reached for it so often.

René Lalique, the leading jeweller of the Art Nouveau period, made notable use of moonstone, combining it with enamel, carved horn, glass and other semi-precious stones in designs built around mood and symbolism rather than displays of costly gemstones. His jewellery was the sensation of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. A major group of his jewels, bought directly from him by the collector Calouste Gulbenkian, is in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, and others are in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Other Paris jewellers working in the style, including Georges Fouquet and Henri Vever, used similar “artistic” materials, and together they cemented the stone’s association with the movement.

A Shared Preference with Arts and Crafts

Moonstone’s popularity in this period also overlapped with the Arts and Crafts jewellery movement, which shared a related but distinct preference for cabochon-cut semi-precious stones over faceted precious gems. Where Art Nouveau jewellers reached for moonstone chiefly for its atmospheric, dreamlike quality, Arts and Crafts designers valued it as part of a broader philosophy that favoured honest, hand-worked materials and craftsmanship over the display of expensive gemstones. In Britain, moonstone cabochons are common in Arts and Crafts silver jewellery made between about 1890 and 1930, by guild workshops and individual makers alike; the London jeweller Sibyl Dunlop, working from the 1920s, often included moonstones in her densely set clusters of mixed coloured stones. In Copenhagen, the silversmith Georg Jensen, who opened his workshop in 1904, set moonstones in many of his silver brooches, pendants and rings, and the combination of moonstone and silver remained characteristic of Scandinavian design into the 1930s and beyond.

Edwardian Moonstone

Away from the art jewellers, moonstone was also fashionable in mainstream Edwardian jewellery. It was set with diamonds and seed pearls in delicate gold and platinum pendants, bar brooches and rings, and in long chains of moonstone beads. A small specialist product of the 1890s to 1910s was the carved moonstone face - a “man in the moon” cut into the dome of a cabochon, often set in a crescent brooch or a stickpin - which played directly on the stone’s name.

Cutting: Cabochon, Not Faceted

Like opal, moonstone is not normally faceted. Its sheen depends on light interacting with the internal layers within the stone, an effect best displayed by a smooth, domed cabochon surface oriented so that the layers lie parallel to its base. Flat, angled facets would interrupt the glow. Moonstone cabochons in Art Nouveau jewellery range from small accent stones to larger single cabochons used as the centrepiece of a pendant or brooch, and were also cut as beads and carved into faces and flowers.

Typical Settings

Rather than heavy precious-stone surrounds, moonstone in this period was more often set in silver or hand-wrought gold mounts, frequently combined with plique-à-jour or other enamel work, and sometimes accompanied by fine wirework or filigree detailing rather than a dense border of diamonds. Arts and Crafts makers typically used simple rubbed-over or claw collets in silver, with leaves, berries or twisted wire around them. This lighter, more artisanal treatment of the setting reflects the same values that drew designers to the stone in the first place.

Symbolism

Moonstone’s name and appearance gave it a long-standing popular association with the moon, night and dreams, an association that suited both its literal visual effect and the broader symbolic, atmospheric concerns of Art Nouveau design. It is often said to have been regarded as a sacred stone in India. As with much gemstone symbolism, these associations reflect period sentiment and popular belief rather than any fixed or authoritative meaning.

Sourcing

Moonstone used in European jewellery of this period came chiefly from Sri Lanka (Ceylon in period sources), long recognised as the principal source of fine adularescent moonstone. The best-known locality is around Meetiyagoda in the south-west of the island, known for stones with a strong blue sheen. Southern India and Burma also supplied moonstone, generally of whiter or more coloured material.

Moonstone was imitated with opalescent glass, and later in the 20th century with other materials. No claim is made here about determining, from a description or photograph, whether a specific moonstone is natural, imitation or treated - that requires specialist gemmological examination.