Victorian Jewellery Design

By Charlotte Gere
William Kimber and Co Ltd
1972 SBN 7183 0232 X

William Kimber and Co writes:

Jewellery design has rarely been so inventive as during the second half of the nineteenth century. Changes in fashion were closely followed, changes which increased in frequency with improved communications and regular international exhibitions, so that fashions which stemmed from Paris or Rome would soon be adopted in England—and America. While mechanical manufacture meant that the growing demand for fashionable jewellery could be met, contemporaries were alert to the dangers of mass production. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was itself directed to raise the standard of design in manufacture, and stern criticisms were leveled against the jewellery produced throughout the period, yet there survives today a wide selection of well designed nineteenth century jewellery of fine workmanship for the collector and the bargain-hunter to browse over.

Identifying the varied styles and fashions which influenced the craftsmen and manufacturers, such as the enthusiasm for neogothic, archaeological motifs, adaptations of Japanese and Indian art, and botanical novelties, Victorian Jewellery Design is an absorbing guide to the probable origin of many of these nineteenth century pieces—providing the kind of knowledge that enabled the author to identify a gold bracelet in an Oxfam shop as being made by Carlo Doria for Robert Phillips. It traces the influences underlying the changes of fashion, and shows how it was frequently artists—sometimes producing their own hand-made pieces—such as William Burges, Charles Rickett, the Pre-Raphaelites and the leaders of Art Nouveau, who introduced fresh inspiration, rather than the trade craftsmen.