Jewelry Lovers

The Tiffany Studios, New York: The American Arts and Crafts Movement

‘Tiffany & Co, produced a prolific amount of jewelry from the latter half of the nineteenth century, first inspired both by British Arts and Crafts and later by Continental Art Nouveau in the first decade of the twentieth century. Louis Comfort Tiffany had been trained as an artist and in collaboration with Julia Munson he managed the jewelry department from 1903. He manufactured luxurious Byzantine-inspired wares, utilizing materials such as opals and amethysts reminiscent of the jewelry at Liberty & Co. in England.

The Tiffany Studios closed in 1916, although the company continues to produce fine jewelry today. When the studio halted production, there were a number of large companies such as Marcus & Co. who continued to emulate the Tiffany ’style’.

During this period, The Craftsman magazine extolled the virtues of simplicity and practicality. These beliefs were to influence the work of another artist-jeweler, Madeline Yale Wynne, who explored the artistic nature of different non-precious materials such as copper, pebbles and rock crystals, rather than the more usual preoccupations with precious and semi-precious metals and stones. This proved to be a much more enduring influence on future design than the Tiffany Studios, because of the search for new forms that indirectly reflected the modern world.

Other American craftsmen who practised within the Arts and Crafts arena included the silversmiths, Clemens Friedell, Janet Payne Bowles and Mildred Watkins, and the jewelers, Brainerd Bliss Thresher, Josephine Hartwell and Florence D. Koehler.

Charles Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft

The Guild of Handicraft was established in 1888 by Charles Ashbee in order to develop techniques and aesthetics in jewelry, as well as in furniture and metalwork. Ashbee was one of the first designers in the Arts and Crafts movement to experiment with jewelry. He produced a range of items at the Guild of Handicraft, including brooches and belt buckles. Initially, there were a few trained jewelers, other than those craftsmen that had worked in metals such as copper and silver. After 1900, however, skilled jewelry craftsmen became more involved within the Guild.

Their work was inspired by the fine craftsmanship and ideologies of the medieval period. It was essentially a reaction to the shoddy machine-made goods that had been created by industrialization in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Charles Ashbee was trained as an architect, as well as a silversmith and jeweler. He provided a great many designs, typified by the famous peacock seen in much of his work, and was influenced by Cellini, perhaps the greatest goldsmith of the Italian Renaissance. Among other designers who produced jewelry at the Guild were Fred Partridge, whose work had much in common with French Art Nouveau in his use of horn and steel, and May Hart, the skilled enamelist, whom Partridge married.

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