Bracelet
Creation details
- Creation year 1919
- Stone Diamond
- Stone Pearl
- Material Platinum
- Usage Bracelet
- Dimensions 190 × 8 mm
This bracelet, created in 1919, illustrates a style of jewelry popular in the 1910s and 1920s: white diamond jewelry. It is composed of a single row of alternating circular and polylobed motifs in platinum.
The former with a closed-set, brilliant-cut diamond surrounded by a row of bead-set diamonds; the latter with a pearl surrounded by six lobes, each set with a single diamond. A diamond joins each of these links. The clasp is hidden by one of the polylobed forms to maintain the bracelet’s cohesion.
Reflecting an original taste for gems
From the Maison’s earliest days in 1906, Alfred Van Cleef, the son of a gem cutter and himself trained in the art of cutting precious stones, and Charles Arpels, a diamond merchant, had a profound impact on the jewelry makers’ approach to design, with their extensive knowledge of stones. The first creations by Van Cleef & Arpels were in keeping with this style known as “white diamond jewelry” that produced strictly monochrome compositions combining platinum with diamonds and, on occasion, pearls.
The diamond and fine pearl trade
While the modernization of African mines in 1866 boosted the diamond trade, the scientific development surrounding platinum ore in the late nineteenth century favored the democratization of the jewelry arts during the early years of the twentieth century. As for the pearl market, it developed considerably between 1870 and 1915. The Persian Gulf was the center of the natural pearl trade which, by the late nineteenth century, operated on a considerably more international scale, enabling it to meet the growing demands of clients from London, Paris, and New York.Guillemette Crouzet, “A Golden Harvest: exploitation et mondialisation des perles du Golfe arabo-persique (vers 1870–1910),” Revue historique, no. 658 (February 2011): 327–356.
BEADED PURSES
BEADED PURSES
The taste for white diamond jewelry
Enthusiasm for white diamond jewelry continued throughout the whole of the twentieth century, not least because it adapted to the decorative developments that typified each decade while maintaining its material singularity, namely the association of diamonds and platinum. The full significance of this 1919 bracelet lies therein: in the fact that it represents a major and continual style of jewelry.
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