Lithograph with designs for jewelry printed with metallic gold ink

Lithograph with designs for nineteenth-century jewels, a plate that originally formed part of a volume of the "Jewelers Circular and Horological Review," a publication established in 1869 as a trade journal dedicated to jewelry, clocks, watches, and silverware. The designs, which include a necklace, pendants, brooches, bracelets, and rings, present the aesthetic of the French Second Empire (1852-1870), which was characterized by extravagant motifs with complex compositions of naturalistic jewelry, composed of clearly recognizable foliage, flowers and fruit, and often presenting frames or roundels with female figures dressed with draped, neoclassical clothes. In many cases, the colors of gemstones used in the creation of the jewels were meant to match those in nature; cabochon gems were popular elements to create complexity in curving and figurative designs, often with symbolic meanings.

The plate contains a design for a necklace with a pendant with geometric design motifs made up of cones, rectangles, scallops, and granules of gold, executed with shades of brown, green, and gold ink; one side of the necklace is made up of a rope decorated with rings, and the other of golden shuttle shapes decorated with stylized branches with leaves, linked by small rings. Underneath the design for a necklace is a design for a bracelet, made up of a gold bangle with a rectangle decorated with alternating diagonal strips, colored with green and white, bordered anove and below by scalloping lines of gold and small golden granules, and flanked to the sides by semi-abstract scrolling motifs. Several designs for earrings, brooches, and two tie or hair pins that match the designs for the necklace and the bracelet, as well as two chatelaine brooches, one with monogrammed JC and the other with a left bust of a man, fill up the rest of the plate.