Design for a Gold, Pearls or Glass Stones and Enamel Brooch

Drawing with a design for a gold, pearls or glass stones and enamel brooch, part of a modern scrapbook with 38 sheets showing designs for jewelry with pearls, diamonds and other (semi-)precious stones all done in watercolor and heightened with gold, characteristic of the period between 1870 and 1930, which saw some of the most extravagant and innovative trends in jewelry design. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the naturalistic compositions of earlier decades had become more complex, and the colors in nature mimicked by the color of gemstones used for jewelry design. In the last years of the century, designs for jewelry had become even more elaborate and relied in the natural beauty of cabochon gems, curving, and figurative designs with symbolic meaning, typical of the Arts and Crafts movement. Towards the end of the nineteenth and through the first decades of the twentieth century, diamond jewelry was re-interpreted to create the new 'garland style', and the Art Nouveau movement created sinuous and organic pieces that moved away from conventional stones and put emphasis on the subtle effects of materials such as glass, horn and enamel. During the 1920s, the economic boom following the war saw an increased glamour in jewelry design, with sharp, geometric patterns that celebrated modernity and the machine age. Art Deco jewelry is characterized by dense concentrations of gemstones and the use of platinum in place of gold, with inspiration from all over the world, especially from the Near and Far East. Like most of the drawings in the album, this design is fully rendered with gouache, showing not only the styles for the jewelry designs, but also suggesting choices of precious metals, stones, and other materials to be used in the creation of the jewels. It is also possible that these designs are real-sized, allowing the customer to visualize the jewel fully from this presentation drawings before commissioning its manufacture.

This design for a brooch is made up of a central rosette made of an oval-shaped pearl with swirls of gold that form the petals around it, framed by a roundel decorated inside with two bullet shapes with small pearls and two quatrefoil motifs with small pearls, and with four larger quatrefoil motifs decorated with a five round pearls each. The quatrefoil motif in the middle upper part of the roundel also contains three pearls on the outside, and small pearls decorate the outer circumference of the roundel between this quatrefoil motif and the two on the sides. From the quatrefoil motif in the bottom of the roundel emerge some scrolls from which three banners hang. The banner in the middle also holds another quatrefoil motif with pearls. Nine pearls hang from both the banners and the quatrefoil motif. The design is colored with gold pignment to suggest the use of gold for the manufacture of the process, and the roundel and the banners are colored with light blue and the large quatrefoil motifs with black, suggesting enamelling as the technique of choice for these. The pearls could also be pieces of glass cut and set to look either like a cabochon stone or beads of glass to replace stones, a technique that was common during in Art Nouveau jewelry design.