in the Indian taste, centred on a raised stylised four-petalled flower head, the surface intricately pierced and consisting of frieze of twin rows of curved motifs applied with twisted wirework and each centred with a floret.
Signed in script ‘Falize, Orf. Paris’, on the clasp.
Although Alexis and Lucien Falize carried out a number of designs for jewellery in the Indian taste, surviving examples are rare. This bangle appears to be signed by the last of the firm’s three generations, Falize Frères, demonstrating the skills of craftsmen who had been formerly employed by their father Lucien. The fully scripted signature, unusual in works of jewellery by the firm, indicates it may have formed part of their display at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900.
Illustrated
See Falize, A Dynasty of Jewellers by Katherine Purcell, pages 221 and 223, for pencil drawings and watercolour designs for a range of jewels in the Indian taste. For a comparable pierced gold bracelet see no. 141 of French jewellery of the Nineteenth Century the catalogue of an exhibition held at Wartski in 2001, illustrated in colour page 19.