Beaux-arts jewelry made in Newark, New Jersey

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

Even more obviously in the beaux-arts mode is the work of Unger Brothers' best-known competitor, the William B. Kerr Company, the maker of the grand car-touche-shaped brooch set with a jade scarab shown in Plate II. It closely parallels the architectural cartouches in stone and wood that abounded in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although oval rather than lozenge shaped, it is similar in conception to the title panel of Die Perle. Because they symbolize fidelity, scarabs were used in jewelry given as tokens of affection between men and women.(11)

Some of the designs by Carl Winkler of Hanau in Die Perle have quite direct parallels with a Kerr belt clasp (Pl. I). The paired griffins or chimeras on Winkler's pendant No. 753 appear paired again on the Newark clasp, where they have merged with great volutes of foliage, more in the manner of Winkler's bracelet plaque No. 757 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. On the other hand, the pendant bowknots and the large bow that joins the griffins on the Kerr clasp are a typically late nineteenth-century nod to Louis XVI design, but that too was a popular beaux-arts mannerism, as we shall see.

The four griffin brooches by three different Newark makers shown in Plate VIII illustrate the popularity of the motif at the end of the nineteenth century. Riker Brothers made their griffins in at least two sizes and both with and without diamond and enamel enrichment, the latter being one of their specialties. Griffin brooches were being produced by the Paris firm of Plisson and Hartz (1872-1904) between 1898 and 1904, but the motif probably dates to the Renaissance revival broches chimeres (chimera brooches) designed by the Parisian jeweler Alphonse Fouquet (1828-1911) in the 1870s and 1880s.(12) All four brooches shown in Plate VIII have on the back an S-shaped hook that allowed the wearer to hang a small watch, a chain, or a pendant jewel from the pin. Indeed, many brooches of the period had this feature and were known generically as chatelaine pins.

The suspender buckle and belt clasp by Kerr shown in Plate IX also demonstrate the influence of Die Perle on Newark jewelry makers. The laughing grotesque on the buckle echoes those on Winkler's necklace No. 759 in Figure 3. More startling is the belt clasp with its goatlike horned masks with rubies for eyes. Because of their demonic quality, such motifs are often associated with art nouveau and its use of occult imagery. However; these masks, perhaps alluding to satyrs, clearly fall into the beaux-arts tradition of grotesque masks based on ancient Roman prototypes. It might be hard to imagine a middle-class housewife buying such a buckle for daily wear, but one must remember that when worn the masks would have been head to head and thus less easily recognizable by a casual observer.

Newark jewelry, whether made of gold or silver, shared a high level of quality and finish. Casting was little used because it made the metal more brittle and because die stamping produced finer details on small pieces. Fine enameling and handwork such as engraving and polishing are typical of even the smallest piece of jewelry from a Newark workshop. Fourteen-karat gold objects were boiled in an acid bath, somewhat akin to pickling silver, to remove the alloys from the surface. The result was a twenty-four-karat gold surface known at the tune as a Roman gold finish. Since karat marks were not required by law in the United States until 1906,(13) Newark jewelry relied on its national reputation for quality.(14)