each centred with an oval turquoise, composed as an openwork diamond-set trefoil containing a motif of similar form within each frame, the stems of each brooch curved to link together.
The two brooches would have been affixed to either side of a cape or cloak, allowing it to be centrally secured.
Paris, c.1890-95.
The young René Lalique (1860-1945) revealed a precocious talent as a draughtsman, studying nature in his native Marne region and during his holidays in the Champagne countryside. He began a two-year apprenticeship with the respected jeweller Louis Aucoc in
Paris in 1876, attending drawing classes at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, which he continued to pursue for a couple of years
in Sydenham, South London. Upon his return in 1880, he decided to dedicate himself to jewellery design, supplying manufacturers and retailers such as Aucoc, Vever and Cartier with bird or botanical motifs for diamond-set jewellery. However surviving drawings reveal a startling breadth of iconography, from stems of geranium and ears of wheat, to grasshoppers and spiders, all
minutely observed.
Lalique progressed from designing to making jewellery when he had the opportunity to take over the workshop of Jules Destape, to whom he had also supplied designs, in 1885. His fertile imagination brought him many commissions, and as his business prospered he moved several times to enlarged premises. His work was present at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, but anonymously so, on the stands of fashionable jewellers including Vever and Boucheron.
Amongst René Lalique’s first jewels to be publicly displayed under his own name, at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français in 1895, was a large diamond, amethyst, opal and enamelled brooch or clasp in the Renaissance taste; it featured a nude female figure chased in gold, the first that he incorporated in a jewel. Indeed from around 1890 to 1895 the Renaissance was his principal source of inspiration. He considered the period may well represent the epitome of jewellery, declaring: ‘Perhaps never has [the jewel]
been as well understood as during the Renaissance: each work was a complete oeuvre, with its own special architecture,
its figurative depictions, and its perfectly executed enamels.’
For a single brooch of similar trefoil design with an arched stem, featuring a thistle accompanied by two leaves, composed of gold and set with cabochon emeralds, see Henri Vever, ‘La Bijouterie Francaise au XIXe Siecle’, Vol. III, p.701 (translated edition, p.1209)
