Beaux-arts jewelry made in Newark, New Jersey

Magazine Antiques, April, 1997 by Ulysses Grant Dietz, Janet Zapata

In recent decades collectors and jewelry historians have paid most attention to the art nouveau jewelry inspired by the work of Rend Lalique (1860-1945), which captured the imagination of designers and jewelry makers at the turn of the century. However, equally if not more popular than its modernistic contemporary was what we call beaux-arts jewelry, the design of which is derived from academic or historicizing sources not necessarily restricted to the Renaissance or Middle Ages.

From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century New York City was the undisputed national leader in glamorous gem-set jewelry, under the guiding influence of such powerful marketers as Tiffany and Company. Providence, Rhode Island, and the Attleboros in Massachusetts became the centers of gold-plated costume jewelry production. And Newark, New Jersey, became the center for the design and production of solid silver and ten- to eighteen-karat gold jewelry aimed at an affluent middle-class market that only began to develop around the middle of the nineteenth century. Wearing jewelry regularly was then still a novelty, and the newly rich were provided with guidelines both on what to wear and what to buy in a flood of etiquette books and fashion manuals.

With incredible inventiveness jewelry makers designed forms to fulfill, or even create, the needs of the prosperous, salaried citizenry - from collar buttons to gold-mesh chatelaine purses, from sleeve buttons to wedding rings. At their peak, from 1890 to 1929, the jewelry makers of Newark produced as much as 90 percent of the solid gold jewelry in America, including 50 percent of the eighteen-karat gold jewelry.(1) In the trade Newark was known as "The City of Gold and Platinum and Precious Stones."(2)

Newark's production closely followed the style of jewelry being made for the middle class in Pforzheim and Hanau in Germany, and in Paris, the major jewelry centers of Europe. Publications such as the weekly Jewelers' Circular and Horological Review provided Americans with the latest styles and fads in European jewelry, and there appears to have been little time lag between European trends and American adaptations of them.(3)

The historical roots of the beaux-arts jewelry made in Newark's workshops can be traced readily enough to the rather generalized Renaissance revival of the 1850s and 1860s in American design. A particularly important jewel in this style is a testimonial to Newark's mayor Thomas B. Peddie, made in 1868 (Pl. IV). Like nearly all Newark jewelry of this period, the piece is unmarked. However, newspaper articles show that it was made by Durand and Company, the foremost Newark jewelry manufacturer at mid-century.(4) Although at first glance the piece appears to be a die-struck medal or military decoration, the medallion in fact demonstrates the collective skills of Newark's jewelers after the Civil War. The applied wreath exhibits the skilled work of a master engraver, as do the chasing and engraving of the arms of the city of Newark and the beribboned beehive that forms the loop for the chain.(5) The beading on the medallion and the spiral braided chain were already specialties of Newark jewelers by this time. The conservative design of this object betrays little that could not have come from earlier decades with the exception of the ornate typography of the mayor's initials.

A similar conservativism is evident in the continuing popularity of cameo jewelry during the nineteenth century. The group shown in Plate VII traces the Newark work of the German-born Ferdinand J. Herpers, and the firm that survived him, from about 1865 to 1900. The suite of pendant and eardrops incorporating onyx cameos exhibits all the hallmarks of the neo-Renaissance manner of the 1860s and was probably made early in Herpers's career. He came to Newark in 1846 and worked as a journeyman for Durand, Carter and Company (1857-1869) and others before establishing his own small shop in 1865, where he made settings for other jewelers as well as his own complete jewelry. The pink chalcedony cameo sleeve buttons and round brooch in Plate VII date from the 1880s, when Ferdinand Herpers's sons Henry F. and Ferdinand Jr. were carrying on the business as Herpers Brothers after their father's retirement. The buttons show a romanticized Elizabethan or Renaissance lady with a high lace ruff. The round brooch depicts a more standard classical profile while its gold collar is engraved with scrolled foliage in the Renaissance manner. In both shape and style the brooch is an 1880s version of the cameo jewelry of the 1860s, which itself was based on early nineteenth-century cameos. The oval pink chalcedony cameo with its surround of pegged seed pearls dates from the turn of the century and has always been owned by members of the Herpers family. The romanticized neoclassical lady mimics eighteenth-century cameos in a sort of throwback to Georgian times.(6) However, the pegged setting for the pearls, the safety catch on the pin, and the swivel pendant loop are all characteristic of jewelry of about 1895 to 1905.(7)