The Fales collection of jewelry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Magazine Antiques, April, 2002 by Janet Zapata, Beth Carver Wees

Is early as 1883 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City began acquiring American jewelry. (1) By the 1930s its holdings comprised necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, and knee buckles. A small display of American jewelry was mounted in 1926, just two years after the opening of the American Wing. (2) While most of these early acquisitions date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, twentieth-century pieces manufactured by Tiffany and Company and Cartier, or by designers such as Florence Koehler (1861-1944), reflect the museum's active interest in contemporary craftsmanship. (3) Two necklaces designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany--one for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in Saint Louis--entered the collection in 1946, followed in 1952 by an arts and crafts ensemble made by Koehler around 1905 for the Chicago industrialist Richard Teller Crane (1832-1912). (4) Major gifts by Susan Dwight Bliss (d. 1966) during the 1940s and 1050s included important examples of diamond jewelry. By the 1970s, t he American jewelry collection numbered approximately seventy pieces.

As in most cultures, in the United States the significance of jewelry made and owned here extends well beyond the domain of personal adornment to encompass social customs, trade patterns, and craft practices, as well as stylistic and technical developments. Like domestic silverwares, jewelry was simultaneously utilitarian and an indication of social standing. Advertisements by early American silversmiths routinely listed jewelry both imported and domestic, among their offerings, and it was through her study of these documents that Martha Gandy Fales first realized the importance of this little studied field. (5) Her seminal book, Jewelry in America, 1600-1900, published in 1995, is the first thorough investigation of the types of jewelry worn by Americans over this period. (6) In the course of her research, Martha Fales and her late husband, Dean (1925-1998), a scholar of American furniture but with a lifelong interest in minerals, assembled an outstanding collection of jewelry either made, or with a history of ownership, in this country Its recent acquisition by the museum, made possible by a generous gift from Susan and Jon Rotenstreich, more than doubled the American Wing's holdings. (7) Ranging in date from 1706 to about 1915, the jewelry in the Fales collection provides a comprehensive and instructive context for the museum's earlier acquisitions. (8) It offers insights into the aesthetic, social, and historical roles of jewelry in the United States as well as the materials and techniques used in its manufacture.

The Fales collection is particularly rich in American jewelry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a time of explosive growth in the United States. As the country prospered, the jewelry industry followed suit, evolving from small workshops where everything was made by hand to large factories with many processes executed by specially designed machines.

The collection includes examples ranging from simple medals to elaborate gem-set confections tailored for the middle and upper classes. There is jewelry incorporating hair, enamel, engraving, casting, and die-stamping, as well as objects made from unusual materials such as tortoiseshell, wood, and vulcanite. The collection also illustrates the exceptional growth of the jewelry industry during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This is evident in the profusion of patents issued to creative jewelers inventing new mechanisms and devices to make jewelry work better and fit more comfortably at a competitive price.

Examples of jewelry from the beginning of the eighteenth century con tamed woven or plaited hair set in decorative gold mounts. As macabre as it might seem today the hair of a deceased loved one was then cherished because it was a part of the body that did not decompose after death, thus becoming a lasting remembrance. Hair jewelry was also given as a token of love during one's lifetime. In all cases, small samples of hair were braided or woven into designs and placed into the back of miniatures or set into lockets, brooches, bracelets, and rings with appropriate obituary or other inscriptions. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries this jewelry was relatively understated in design, with gold worked in elegant yet simple settings (see P1. I). By the mid-nineteenth century hair jewelry had become bolder in conception, with hair arranged in three- dimensional shapes, gold fittings, and clasps of grander design, often set with gemstones. See, for instance, the brooch in Plate II, set with faceted jet a nd pearls, and the one in Plate III set with pearls and accented with enamel.

In the early nineteenth century flowers held special meanings to convey sentiments. On the earrings and brooch in Plates Va and Vb, the forget-me-nots placed against a blue enameled ground symbolized the desire to be remembered by an absent loved one, while the pearls represented innocence. In the 1840s, enameling was rare in the United States, and it is likely that on these pieces it was executed by an artisan specializing in the technique, by which vitreous enamel, which is glass, is bonded with heat onto a metal surface. Enameling can add an almost unlimited spectrum of colors to jewelry. It can also enhance gemstones and pearls, as it does on this set, where the whiteness of the pearls stands out against the blue ground, which was first worked with engine-turning to create a geometric pattern before the enamel was applied.