Tiffany & Co, started in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany, is a jewellery company associated with many things: the Tiffany set solitaire diamond engagement ring, the little blue box, and of course the Audrey Hepburn 1961 film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
It is also well known for collaborating with the top designers of the day and more than that, of enabling four of them to put their signature to their pieces and promote themselves alongside the Tiffany name. The first such designer was Jean Schlumberger.
Jean Schlumberger was born in France in 1907. His family owned a textile manufacturing business, but he chose not to join the family firm and after a short spell in Berlin working in a bank, he went to Paris. There he worked for couturier, Lucien Lelong and flourished in the city buzzing with a heady mixture of cultural, musical and artistic ideas.
Jean Schlumberger: A Self-Taught Sensation
Schlumberger was a self-taught artist and jeweller who began his career by creating pieces from bits and pieces he found Parisian Marché aux Puces flea market. He used Meissen porcelain flowers, shells and cameos to make jewellery for the social elite including fashion editor, Diana Vreeland and Marina, Duchess of Kent.
It was a pair of earrings worn by the Duchess of Kent in 1937 that caught the attention of Elsa Schiaparelli, the Italian fashion designer. She asked Schlumberger to create buttons for her 1938 Circus Collection, which he did, the most memorable being a flying acrobat. In so doing he joined a group of well- known contemporary artists who had collaborated with Schiaparelli including Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali and Louis Aragon. Their surreal adornments became known as “bijoux fantaisie”.
Schiaparelli described the buttons Schlumberger designed for her Circus Collection as,
“the most unbelievable objects…animals, feathers, caricature, paperweights, chains, locks…some were wood, plastic, but none resembled anything a button should resemble”.
This Circus Collection commission ensured he earnt international renown and he began to work with precious stones and gold. The Jean Schlumberger articulated goldfish lighter became the most sought-after accessory in New York and Paris in 1939.
After serving in the French army in World War II, surviving Dunkirk, he was evacuated to England in 1940. During this time he created a brooch for the fashion editor Diana Vreeland, using colourful gemstones, diamonds and enamel. The brooch, a shield with spears, was called the Trophée de Vaillance brooch. Diana Vreeland said she kept it as a protective talisman on her bedside table.
In 1942 he returned to fight for the Free French Forces. After the war, in 1946 he left France, for New York. Nicolas Bongard, who was Jeanne Boivin’s nephew and had experience of working for that famous jewellery company, was a childhood friend of Schlumberger. Together they opened a jewellery shop on 21 East 63rd Street and then a second in Paris in 1950.
The Art of Nature
After a trip to Bali in 1954 he was so inspired by all that he saw, that the natural world would become the mainstay of his designs, coupled with the surreal influences that imbued his motifs with their dreamlike quality. “I want to capture the irregularities of the universe. I observer nature and find verve”.
For the rest of his life he liked to holiday in tropical regions of the world, as he delighted in what he saw there. Flora and fauna, creatures from land and sea would feature heavily in his work. He stated he wanted to “make everything look as if it were growing, uneven, at random, organic, in motion”. However, he did not forget his textile heritage and so ribbons, tassels and rope were also incorporated in his mercurial designs, the perfect balance of the organic with the geometric.
In 1956 Tiffany & Co asked Jean Schlumberger to join the company as their signature designer. Now with a studio of his own, complete creative freedom and the Tiffany & Co jewellery stocks at his disposal, and Jean Schlumberger created some of his best and most admired work. He created three settings for the famous Tiffany Yellow Diamond in his first year at the company. In 1956 he designed the Ribbon Rosette necklace for the 128.54-carat diamond, which Audrey Hepburn wore on the Breakfast at Tiffany press tour. In 1965 the diamond was re-set in another of Schlumberger’s iconic creations: Bird on a Rock. A jewelled tropical bird, with exotic plumage, sits on the diamond in this simple yet eye catching design which continues to be made today. For today’s clientele the bird perches on citrines, aquamarines, or even a pearl “rocks”.
In 1958 Jean Schlumberger was awarded the Coty America Fashion Critics’ Award, the first time it had been won by a jeweller. In years to come another Tiffany designer, Elsa Peretti, would win the same award.
Jean Schlumberger's Celebrity Endorsements
Jean Schlumberger is also well-known for his curved x motif found in the Sixteen Stone ring and the Cooper bracelet. It is also featured on his Croisillon bracelets. These enamel bracelets are created using paillonée enamel, a 19th century process where layers of translucent coloured enamel are applied over fine motifs of silver or gold leaf. This results in particularly bright colours and a high-intensity brilliance and shine. First Lady Jackie Kennedy wore many of these Croisillon bracelets that they became known as “Jackie” bracelets.
Elizabeth Taylor also spot-lit Jean Schlumberger’s work when she wore a dolphin brooch made by Schlumberger prior to the premiere of Richard Burton’s film “Night of the Iguana”. She wore it so often that it became known as the “Night of the Iguana” brooch and again, increased the demand for jewellery with the Schlumberger name.
Other famous purchasers include Greta Garbo, Gloria Vanderbilt and Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor and Bunny Melon. Bunny Melon had such a large collection of Jean Schlumberger jewellery that can now be viewed in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Amongst the stunning examples of his work that can be seen there are her Jasmine necklace, where a fringe of diamond-set jasmine flowers encircle multi-coloured sapphires. The butterfly bracelet she wore is set with amethyst, sapphires, turquoise, peridots and diamonds but the more striking thing about it that the butterflies are set en tremblent and appear to fly above the flowers. In 1967 Bunny Melon was stung by a jellyfish in Antigua and so Jean Schlumberger created a beautiful brooch made with sapphires, moonstones and diamonds but more than that, the tendrils were articulated and moved.
Diana Vreeland had begun as a client but became a close friend of Jean Schlumberger and said of him that he,
"appreciates the miracle of jewels. For him, they are the ways and means to the realization of his dreams."
With the wealth of stones available to him Jean Schlumberger was able to re-introduce to the jewellery buying public gemstones with strong, bright and more varied colours than had been recently used in high jewellery. He was particularly drawn to aquamarine, turquoise, emerald, amethyst, jade, and pink tourmaline. By combining traditional gemstones in new, bold and unusual ways, coupled with his surreal and dreamlike interpretations of what he saw in the natural world, Jean Schlumberger was able to create unique and never before seen jewellery for Tiffany & Co over a thirty-year career.
