Art Nouveau Jewelry

Particularly sought after at auction, the Art Nouveau jewel uses curved lines, "whiplash", organic, fluid volumes, ... It is of course René Lalique who will launch the Art Nouveau jewel.


The imagery of the Art Nouveau jewel brings together woman, nature and its metamorphoses. The woman is treated in full, her body, her hair is staged in extravagant compositions. Nature, always exploited in jewelry, is, in Art Nouveau, purified of all bucolic lyricism and all romantic affectio. New plants are represented such as thistle or mistletoe, parasites of arid lands and trees. The creatures chosen are also more fantastic: insects, strange sea animals, night owls or prey…


The Art Nouveau jewel is also innovative in the materials and techniques used: use of enamels and in particular up-to-date plique enamel, that is to say bottomless, molded glass, gems hitherto very little used in France, and organic materials like horn, tortoiseshell, coral.

The diamond is no longer the queen stone, the gems used are fine stones: opal and moonstone with their changing reflections, chalcedony, chrysoprase, mother-of-pearl, turquoise ...


For the first time, the importance goes more to the work of the goldsmith than to the raw materials, the jewelers feel more creative than technicians.


René Lalique remains the most innovative and inventive jeweler of this period, both at the formal level transforming women into hybrid beings, attaching themselves to strange animals (seahorses, bats, dragonflies) and at the technical level: use fluidized gold, enamels in all their forms: champlevés, plique-à-jour, with inclusions…


Other jewelers are inspired by this new style: Georges Fouquet who created extraordinary jewelry for Sarah Bernhardt, Henri Vever, Lucien Gaillard who, strongly influenced by Japan, specialized in the work of the horn.


The big jewelry houses, Boucheron, Cartier, Chaumet were much more discreet in this movement and, because they continued to use precious stones, their jewelry from this time was often melted or transformed, they are rare today.