Die Perle: Neue Ausgabe. Weltorgan für Juwelen: Gold und Silverarbeiter

Collection of loose plates and three title pages for various issues of "Die Perle" (The Jewel), an Austrian journal for jewelry of the 19th century. The plates in the collection contain a variety of jewelry designs from the time, including brooches, pendants, hair ornaments, earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. The design aesthetic of the last decades of the 19th century presented naturalistic forms, often in the shape of clearly recognizable flowers, fruit and foliage. Designs were often extravagant, with complex compositions of natural motifs, eften executed in diamonds, and with some frequency matching the colors in nature with colored stones. Towards the end of the century, the Arts & Crafts movement, rejecting the machine-led system of the industralized world, returned its focus to handcrafted pieces of jewelry, relying on the natural beauty of cabochon gems, and producing figurative designs with sinuous shapes and symbolic meanings. Most of the designs included in the plates follow these styles of the last decades of the 19th century.