Beaux-arts jewelry made in Newark, New Jersey

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

Perhaps most startling among the neo-Louis jewels produced in Newark's best factories are pieces with enameled guilloche engraving of the kind most often associated with European firms such as Cartier and Faberge. The two lockets in the Louis XVI manner in Plate XVIII are striking examples, and both retain their matching enameled necklace chains. The high level of workmanship in Newark's shops is evident in these pieces. Even to a sophisticated customer such jewelry would have been indistinguishable from its European counterparts.

Newark-made jewelry was sold in the finest retail shops all over the United States,(21) but the customers almost never knew the maker. Retailers had no interest in divulging such information especially if, like Tiffany and Cartier, they had a substantial reputation for manufacturing their own products. Furthermore, the Newark makers did not particularly care if their names were known to consumers. Their reputation for quality and style was firmly established in the trade and that, after all, was where the money was.

The beaux-arts jewelry made in Newark made its influence felt anonymously but widely in America between 1880 and 1930. Art nouveau jewelry was also produced in Newark in large quantities, and it too owed its inspiration to European sources. However, almost all the jewelry produced in Newark was aimed at a more bourgeois market than the glamorous jewelry made in Paris, London, Vienna, and New York City. To that end designs were modified, simplified, and scaled back to make them economically feasible for commercial production. The long reach of the Newark manufacturers is impressively exemplified in the following excerpt from the Newark Evening News, of January 9, 1917:

Before a jeweler's window in St. Mark's Square, Venice, a Newarker of means listened to his wife. "Dear, please buy me that platinum ring - the one with the ruby in it. I do so want to take back home a typical souvenir of Venice; one that I may keep always and whenever I look at it be reminded of moonlight nights and gondoliers." The man succumbed, but, being a jeweler himself, he examined the ring closely and learned that it was a product of Newark - the platinum had been refined and the setting made here, in one of the best of the city's some 200 jewelry factories. But he didn't tell his wife - he allowed her to keep on dreaming of her Venetian souvenir.

On May 7 an exhibition entitled The Glitter and The Gold: Fashioning America's Jewelry will open at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, where it will remain on view until November 2. The exhibition and the accompanying book written by Ulysses Grant Dietz et al. will survey the development of Newark's fine jewelry industry from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century.

1 Julia B. Smith, The Jewelry Industry in Newark (Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey, 1929), pp. 4-5.

2 This was part of the tide of an article published in Keystone, May 1925, pp. 161-192.

3 An example is a brooch in the shape of a woman with butterfly wings made by the Paris jeweler Gaston Lafitte in 1904. within the year Whiteside and Blank of Newark produced its own version of the brooch. For the Lafitte brooch see Hugh Tait et al., The Art of the Jeweller, A Catalogue of the Hull Grundy Gift to the British Museum: Jewellery, Engraved Gems and Goldsmiths' Work (British Museum, London, 1984), vol. 2, Pl. 58. For the Whiteside and Blank version see the Jewelers' Circular - Weekly, vol. 51, no. 4 (August 23, 1905), p. 24; and ANTIQUES, December 1996, p. 819, Pl. XV.