Nine designs for brooches with stylized flowers and leaves

F. Mellerio Borgnis

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Drawing with nine designs for brooches, part of an album of drawings in pen and ink of designs for jewelry in the style of the French School of the 19th century, designed for the French jewelry house Mellerio-Borgnis. Four designs consist of bundles of stylized, green leaves, with handing strips of pearls of different sizes, one of them with three large, red pearls, another with a gold frame and with a thin garland of tiny pearls, and two with scrolls of gold from which the bundles hang. One design consists of a pear-shaped escutcheon with scrolling, semi-abstract leaves inside, flanked by what might be semi-abstract insect legs, and with a head on top. The remaining four brooches consist of oval-shaped roundels, some vertical and some horizontal, flanked with scrolls of different types, sometimes with accents of small, stylized leaves, colored with green or gray, silver flowers, and small pearls. These designs might have been manufactured using both gold and silver, to create the different colors of metal in the brooches, and the green might have been achieved through enamel or the use of small (semi-) precious stones of green color.

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