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For centuries, humankind has sought to adorn its body, embracing the aesthetic attractions of the jewel. Jewelry is among history’s oldest known artifacts, with examples dating back 100,000 years. Like the fine and decorative arts, the jeweler's art is a reflection of its place and time, with changing fashions, techniques and materials influencing jewelry forms of each new decade.
M.S. Rau's online exhibition, Extravagant Jewels, explores the complex historic and stylistic changes of jewelry design in the 19th and 20th centuries. Showcasing important gems from the Victorian age to the Retro era, the exhibition explores aesthetic connections across the ages, as well as the intersection between jewelry design, the decorative arts and popular culture.
Victorian
Like the Georgian period that preceded it and the Edwardian period that followed, the Victorian age was named for its reigning monarch, Queen Victoria. Spanning from 1837 until 1901, her 63-year reign was longer than any preceding monarch. Few periods of history embody as much importance as the Victorian era, a diverse age of progressive scientific advances, exploration, expansion and invention. It was a time when Britain had reached the height of its power, having defeated the French Emperor Napoléon and built one of the most vast modern empires that the world had ever seen.
While the Empire was far-reaching, the Industrial Revolution flourished back home in Britain, bringing with it new markets, a rise in consumerism and widespread prosperity. Amid this innovation and change, a new, thriving middle class developed whose wealth sparked an unprecedented demand for jewelry in the mass market. The resulting jewelry crafted during this period is a product of the changing fortune and unprecedented prosperity of the time.
Edwardian
Known for its elegance and intricacy, Edwardian jewelry is named for King Edward VII, though the style has its origins in the final years of Queen Victoria's reign. It was the very last period of jewelry design to be defined by and named for a British monarch, and like its predecessors, it is a true reflection of its time and place. While jewelry under Queen Victoria came to represent her great love and her great loss, Edwardian jewelry undoubtedly reflects King Edward's penchant for luxury.
A playboy in his youth, he inherited a golden age from his mother, reigning over a vast British Empire that had not been seen before or since. The king was a skilled diplomat, and famously presided over the formation of the Triple Entente, an alliance between Britain, France and Russia, an action that would prove crucial with the onset of the World War I. As a whole, Britain prospered, and Edward and his wife, Alexandra, indulged in the luxury of the age.
Art Nouveau
Developing alongside the Edwardian style was the more daring Art Nouveau, similarly growing out of a rejection of the machine-made designs and heavy mourning jewelry that dominated the High Victorian age. Translating from the French to “New Art,” Art Nouveau moved away from the neoclassicism that informed all aspects of the arts that had came before. A neoclassical emphasis on symmetry and proportion was set aside in favor of organic forms that embraced the inherent asymmetry of the natural world.
The roots of the Art Nouveau movement were twofold. The first hints of the style emerged in Britain thanks to the influence of the Arts & Crafts movement of William Morris, which championed the role of the designer in an age of industrialization. Like the Art Nouveau style, the Arts & Crafts movement touched all aspects of the decorative arts, seeking to bring beauty and art into the everyday rather than placing it upon a pedestal. Guilds emerged that championed the work of the artisan, supporting a new generation of artists and designers in opposition to the machines of industry.
Art Deco
As the Art Nouveau movement began to wane in the years before the First World War, it paved the way for a new style to emerge: Art Deco. The movement takes its name from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a world's fair hosted in Paris that marked the zenith of the Art Deco style. Immensely popular, the fair attracted over 16 million people during its seven-month run, showing wares from 15,000 exhibitors in the new "style moderne."
Previously, the term “Cubism” was used to describe this new, avant-garde design ethos, and the angular, geometric jewelry that brought forms back to their basics certainly are suited to the term. Whereas Art Nouveau was a reaction against the machine-made wares of the Industrial Age, Art Deco embraced the technological innovation, industrial materials and mechanization of the modern era. Its design principles emphasized clean lines and streamlined aesthetics that were the antithesis of the over-exuberant flourishes of the Art Nouveau age.
Emerging just before the onset of World War II, Retro jewelry was truly an amalgamation of all the jewelry designs that came before. Designers married the geometry of Art Deco with the organic sensuality of Art Nouveau, rounding sharp edges and emphasizing volume over starkness. The period also saw a return to the abundant floral motifs that prevailed during the Victorian and Edwardian ages in a highly modern interpretation of the past. Its very name, “retro,” is from the Latin for “backwards,” suggesting a style imitative of the past. Despite its myriad of influences, Retro jewelry was first and foremost a product of its distinctive time and place, reflecting the turbulent and ever-changing world of the 1940s and early 1950s.
Retro
Victorian
Edwardian
Art Nouveau
Art Deco
Retro