1927

Flower brooch

Creation details

Creation year 1927
Usage Clip
Dimensions 76 × 65 mm

The Cattleya orchid, originally from Central and South America, appears to blossom before our very eyes in this brooch. Its design was highly naturalistic at a time—the 1920s—when the Art Deco style prevailed in the jewelry arts.

The middle of the flower is accentuated by a central claw-set diamond mounted on platinum. Two petals radiate out from it, one either side, pave-set with brilliants and with openwork to mark their central vein. Three sepals, also with openwork but thinner and more elongated, curve at the tips, one of them even revealing its underside in a movement that confers great liveliness to the whole piece. Lastly, the labellum at the top, with its horn shape and wavy contours, completes the spontaneity of the piece.

A realistic transcription

This aptitude for transcribing the irregular contours of a flower was already visible in the ink drawing of the retail card for this brooch. The flower’s texture was also elicited with cross-hatching. While similarity of form was sought here, there was clearly no desire to render the orchid’s vibrant color palette. The brooch shows the continued use of traditional white diamond jewelry, inherited from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Product card of a *Flower* brooch, 1927.

A naturalist interpretation of the flora and fauna

This naturalistic floral motif can be likened to pieces displaying animal iconography, notably the multitude of “bird” brooches designed by Van Cleef & Arpels from the start of the 1920s.

1927

Bird of Paradise brooch

1927

Bird of Paradise brooch

This Bird of Paradise brooch dating from 1927 is part of a set of “exotic birds from distant lands” and other species living in France that adorned brooches and hat pins initiated during the 1910s and the 1920s.

It is an outstanding example of 1920s white diamond jewelry and renders the bird’s anatomy as realistically as possible. The plumage is finely executed in platinum edged with a beaded thread, and set with rose- and brilliant- cut diamonds throughout.

Page from the Van Cleef & Arpels catalog presenting diamond Bird brooches and hat pins, 1922.

Diamond jewelry : between tradition and innovation

During the 1920s, it was “in white diamond jewelry that novelty was to be sought.”¹ Instigated by the Art Deco movement, the jewelry arts used “diamonds […] with features that [had] never previously been seen” […]. The baguette cut is giving contrast to monochrome compositions, and is better suited to the use of linear contours. The Flower brooch is therefore in keeping with traditional jewelry, while seeking inspiration in the avant-garde precepts of the period.