Lalique and the artistic jewel

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 1998 by Joan T. Rosasco

It all depends. A mermaid in gold, with eyes of chrysoprase. An Egyptian scarab. A large engraved amethyst. A not very heavy bracelet said to have been chased by a master-hand. A lyre or star, mounted as a brooch. A studded tortoise. In a word, all of them frightful.(1)

In 1990, the term "artistic jewel" would have been universally understood as synonymous with "Lalique jewel" or, more likely, "jewel in the Lalique style."

Rene Lalique, born in 1860, was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to the distinguished Paris jewelry and goldsmith firm of Louis Aucoc.(2) In 1885, after studying in London, he acquired a workshop of his own and began to fabricate jewels in the traditional style, many of which were sold to other firms. A corsage ornament in the form of a flight of swallows, graduated in size as if seen in perspective, was a conceit that Lalique presented to the firm of Boucheron [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED]. The great popularity of the piece overcame Boucheron's initial scepticism. A diamond-set brooch in the form of three little songbirds perched on a rose branch was made for the Maison Vever in 1889 [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED].

Lalique also made more spectacular diamond jewelry of which Aunt Alicia would have heartily approved. Indeed, some of it was worn by the most fascinating of the courtesans who flourished at the turn of the century - Liane de Pougy. As depicted in a photograph of 1892, she is wearing a diamond diadem and seven strands of pearls. Lalique made both her large double-bow brooch and diamond corsage ornament in the form of scrolls from which hang a fringe with nine enormous pendant stones. Yet this was the style of jewelry that Lalique was determined to leave behind. In his history of nineteenth-century French jewelry Henri Vever (1854-1942) asserts that Lalique began an intensive period of experimentation in the early 1890s as he began to revive and perfect exacting techniques of enameling and to work with baroque pearls, opals, chrysoprases, citrines, and other unusual semiprecious stones and to invent a personal iconography related to the dream-like imagery characteristic of symbolism.

Pendants from the 1890s incorporate motifs familiar from contemporary poetry. In Stephane Mallarmes sonnet "Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui,"(3) for example, a pristine swan imprisoned in icy water embodies the poet's hopeless quest for perfection. Lalique's swan pendants, which are virtuoso displays of the enamelers art, seem to consciously emulate Mallarme's vision [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES VIII, IX OMITTED]. One of these swan pendants belonged to Queen Alexandra of England, who was known for her swan-like neck and for the wide choker necklaces that showed it off.

Chokers were not new. In 1874, when Mallarme was producing the Derniere Mode, an elegant fashion magazine for which he wrote all the articles under various feminine aliases, "Marguerite de Ponty" reported on a new style of necklace called a dog collar. "What is it? I put it simply: a little black velvet ribbon that, circling the neck, is fastened with a small square buckle through which it passes and falls."(4) By the mid-1890s the dog-collar necklace had assumed exaggerated proportions. Often it was composed of as many as twelve or fourteen strands of pearls supported vertically by narrow bars or a central rectangular plaque. For Lalique these plaques became frames in which to insert his own poetic miniatures.

In the plaque shown in Plate XIII two musicians play Greek double flutes in a grove of trees with diamond blossoms. In another a flight of enamel swallows is silhouetted against a sky formed by a plaque of shimmering opal, and in a third medieval knights joust beneath a giant thistle. The solemn princess surrounded by lively green frogs in the plaque in Plate XI was inspired by a ballet entitled La Princesse au sabbat of which the detailed story was written by the symbolist writer and journalist Jean Lorrain [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. The ballet was performed at the Folies-Bergeres in Paris in 1898. Lorrain, a fervent admirer of Lalique, was painted by the society portraitist Antoino de La Gandara wearing an army of elaborate rings, several presumably by Lalique, who appears in one of Lorrain's novels under the pseudonym Barruchini.(5)

Traditionally, a strict demarcation has been made between precious and imitation stones. An indication of the low esteem in which imitation gemstones were held is Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Necklace" (1885) in which a poor woman works for years to repay a friend for the diamond necklace she had borrowed and lost, only to learn in the end that it was a worthless copy.

For Lalique it was a short step from enamel to glass. According to Vever, the first of Lalique's jewels to incorporate glass was a spectacular corsage ornament he made about 1896 for a Russian client on the unusual but appropriate theme of a wintry landscape.(6) A pendant from the same period is a variation on the theme of winter [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XII OMITTED], showing gold pine boughs laden with white enamel snow, while a plaque of molded glass represents the trunks of other trees in the misty distance. Such a jewel might be seen as a literal, if ironic, rendering of the prevailing mode for parures of diamonds and pearls that gave society ladies the icy allure of the Snow Queen in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale.