Cartier Jewellery Influences

For its exquisite and highly original creations, Cartier drew on nature, history, and exotic foreign lands for themes and motifs rendered spectacularly in platinum, gold, enamel and precious stones. Turn of the century jewellery was ornate and classical in design.

Louis Cartier created ornate pieces distinguished by graceful symmetries and harmonious proportions. His first bold innovation was the replacement of gold and silver with a newly developed, purer form of platinum, making it possible to produce an assortment of necklaces brooches, tiaras, and other items.

The first quarter of the 20th century saw the first rise of Modernism. Paris exhibitions highlighted paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cezanne; Henri Matisse and other young artists created works with bold colours and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were experimenting with a new style called Cubism. Cartier and his designers were forging innovations in jewellery and accessories, drawing from traditions of the previous century with the intention of creating something new and ahead of its time. Compositions were becoming more geometric in design, incorporating straight lines and smooth circles and mirroring the new feminine silhouette in fashion.

At the same time, Cartier was breaking ground with designs that combined precious stones and metals with varieties of onyx, ivory, agate, rock crystals, coral and jade. The critical and public excitement generated by these innovations was such that jewellery became more about design than opulence.

By 1909, the Cartier business had expanded to London and New York, where Jacques and Piere Cartier, respectively, opened Cartier businesses and joined their brother in the trade. In London, Jacques Cartier’s frequent trips to India and the maharajahs that made up a large part of the London business resulted in a singular Cartier style. In New York the Cartier business re-interpreted original Paris designs to suit its American clientele, including prominent society figures and theatre and Hollywood icons.

The House of Cartier employed talented Paris designers who were responsible for the creation of many of the firm's most remarkable pieces. Chief among them was Charles Jacqueau, hired in 1909.
From the beginning of his career, Louis Cartier had been interested in the many possibilities for wristwatches, which, because they were considered practical, but not elegant, were in low demand among his clientele. His creations, made of platinum with combinations of rubies, pearls, sapphires, and other precious gems emerged during a transformation in women's fashions that introduced bare arms and subsequently catapulted his "bracelet watches" to being in the highest demand.

In the years preceding World War I, jewellery and accessory designers in St. Petersburg, Russia, were emerging amidst a growing demand for ornamental objects and accessories. Louis Cartier attempted to capture the Russian market, hiring the country's best craftsmen and creating small hardstone sculptures in competition with Faberge. Opal, jade, moonstone, turquoise, quarts, and agate were used to create superbly detailed flowers, birds, and other animals that became the foundation of the Cartier business in Russia. Cartier was even so bold as to create two ornamental eggs, normally a Faberge monopoly, the first of which was a gift by the City of Paris to Czar Nicholas II.

By 1920, a fascination with the exoticism of the Far East was reflected in decorative objects, jewellery, and accessories. Cartier's passion for Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian culture is in evidence by the motifs of his works at this time.

The 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb and its ancient Egyptian treasures contributed a range of highly structured motifs and provided new geometric features. Materials commonly associated with the East such as jade, coral, and mother-of-pearl-prevailed.

Already famous for its pioneering designs and vast variety of brooches, bracelets, watches, cigarette and cosmetic cases, boxes, and decorative objects, Cartier introduced so called "mystery clocks," whose two hands seemed to move independently of any mechanism at the centre of a transparent dial. The clocks were elaborately ornamental and boldly architectural, with materials often including rock crystal, topaz, citrine, and aquamarine for the face, and used the combined talents of clockmakers, goldsmiths, enamellers, lapidaries, setters, and polishers.

By the late 1920s, the firm was producing intricate designs using combinations of gems. The mixture of intense colour rubies, sapphires, and emeralds later earned this style of jewellery the nickname "tutti frutti."
The onset of the Depression in 1929 and the economic, political, and social implications generated yet another change in art and design. Intense colours were not abandoned altogether, but took shape in simpler lines and more solid forms. Elegance was not forgotten though and Cartier continued to produce distinctive accessories.

In the late 1930s, gold began to replace the prohibitively expensive platinum in jewellery. Meanwhile, owners realized the jewels from a long necklace could be used to create a shorter necklace, bracelet, and brooch. With fashions and fortunes changing simultaneously many Cartier customers brought in their jewellery of years past and had the gems reworked to create new pieces, or to be made available for sale.

Egyptian style pieces were produced by other jewellers such as Van Cleef and Arpels but what distinguishes Cartier items is their close reliance on the major source books of Egyptian art. The most important of these was the Description de l’Egypte which was a result of Napoleon’s expeditions in 1798.

Charles Jacqueau made several sketches of Egyptian objects from a number of other sources. These survive among his working designs along with sketches for Egyptian style jewels. One sketch, ‘Art egyptien de Capart’, was taken from J.Capart’s Art Egyptien which showed a painting from the tomb of Prince Djihutihotep, depicting his daughters, one of whom wears a crown of lotus blossoms which must have inspired a Cartier bandeau of lotus blossoms in onyx and diamonds in 1923.

Other objects designed by Cartier incorporated actual Egyptian antiquities which presented the challenge of creating a contemporary jewel around an ancient piece. Cartier’s Egyptian style designs were made during barely a decade but the colour combinations derived from Egyptian antiquities spread through many areas of their production.

Cartier's Indian experience began in 1901 when Pierre Cartier was asked to create from various pieces of her jewellery, an Indian necklace for Queen Alexandra, Empress of India and wife of Edward VII. The necklace was to be worn with three Indian gowns sent to her by Mary Curzon, wife of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India. Indian influence was pronounced in London because of its position as part of England's Empire and therefore it was Cartier's London branch headed by Jacques Cartier that handled the Indian business.

Jacques Cartier made his first trip to India in 1911. It was during this trip that he consolidated his contacts with India's maharajahs, spending time with them at their palaces. This was to result in not only a long and profitable patronage of the firm by India's royalty, but also a distinctive influence that would inspire Cartier to new realms of creativity in the art of jewellery design. While the Indian princes were interested in having their jewels reworked in the European style, it was the traditional use of carved coloured stones and enamel work, that inspired the oriental feeling that would characterize Cartier's Art Deco designs.

The principal designers at Cartier, Jacqueau in Paris and Genaille in New York, managed to crystallize in their jewels the seemingly light airiness of delicate platinum workmanship with the floral themes that represent the fusion of Persian and Indian decorative motifs that define Mogul design. The stones they used in the pieces of this period were cut and engraved in leaf, flower and berry shapes, seemingly attached to a pavé diamond stem, with diamonds inset into some of the "berries" as well as collet-set as accents. Known popularly as "fruit salad" and "tutti frutti," these jewels reflect the pursuit of the exotic that captivated the sophisticated European and American collectors of the 1920's and 1930's.

Chinese and Japanese patterns are found throughout the Cartier design repertoire. Items incorporated Chinese and Japanese elements such as carved jade or lacquer panels and oriental motifs ‘borrowed’ for a Cartier piece. These motifs were displayed in Cartier items before the First World War and continued into the 1920’s where dragon motifs derived from Chinese bronzes were especially popular. During the 1920’s Cartier also produced their infamous series of mystery clocks designed around large scale Chinese jade sculptures. Cartier was never reluctant to borrow, sometimes in wholesale quantities, the elegant design and craftsmanship of other cultures. The mystery clocks became the setting for some of the firm's most theatrical designs and its most enthusiastic borrowings. The portico series was especially representative of the firm's ability to merge exotic themes, materials and objects with technical wizardry and artistic innovation.

Some Cartier pieces including the cigarette and vanity case were directly influenced by the Japanese inro – a small case for personal effects comprising of a series of compartments that slotted together and held in place by a cord and tightened with a sliding bead and attached to the belt with a netsuke. Cartier adapted the shape of the inro to suit the vanity case. The Japanese silk cord was replaced by a chain and the netsuke was replaced by a ring at the top. Another notable Japanese influence is in the series of clocks designed to resemble a Shinto shrine gate with columns of dark green jade or black onyx.

A major exhibition of the art of jeweller Louis Cartier--tracing a progression of design styles from the opulence of the turn of the century through the innovative geometrics and exoticisms of the 1920s and 1930s took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City in 1997. On display were superbly crafted objects from jewellery to clocks, watches, vanity cases, cigarette boxes, and other accessories, and include design drawings and recently discovered original plaster casts, used as three-dimensional records by the firm. Featured are the greatest achievements of the House of Cartier during the decades of  Louis Cartier's brilliant leadership through the advent of World War II, a period when it became a principal exponent of the Art Deco style.

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