A SUPERB BELLE EPOQUE OPAL PENDANT NECKLACE

Art Nouveau enjoyed a brief but remarkable flowering, emerging as a fashionable style in the early 1890s and lasting through about 1910. Its creators took their main inspiration from nature, consciously rejecting the mechanization that had gripped the world since the Industrial Revolution. Art Nouveau designers embraced romanticism and femininity, creating emotive pieces of harmony and beauty. They also owed a large debt to Japanese art and its emphasis on organic line and simplified form. Inextricably woven with the story of Art Nouveau is that of the Symbolist movement, which had dominated Parisian literature and painting in the preceding decades. Symbolism began as a literary movement that could be traced back to Baudelaire. Symbolism's proponents rejected materialism and made freedom of the imagination supreme. Jean Moréas, a Greek-French poet, declared in his manifesto of Symbolism in 1886, that art should concern itself with ideas, emotion and beauty. The artistic realization of Symbolist theory resulted in works full of mystery, suggestion and illusion. Symbolist painters often used figurative subject matter to express ideas from the deepest recesses of the imagination. In symbolist painting, one finds ethereal figures hinting at repressed passions and flights of emotion. Often depicted are exotic creatures of the imagination, women with peacock feather tails or whose bodies metamorphose into griffins, sphinx or birds. While Symbolism found its greatest expression in painting, the essence of Art Nouveau was most intensely realized in jewelry. From Symbolism, Art Nouveau artists took the impulse to reject mechanization and to bring to life flights of the imagination. Paris was the major center of creativity for the Art Nouveau style, and a generation of Parisian jewelers embraced the new aesthetic of fantasy and sensuality. The Paris International Exhibition of 1900 provided them with a major showcase for their creations, of which some of the more fantastic pieces were never intended for female adornment but only for display. Taking inspiration from an imaginative view of nature, Art Nouveau jewelers often transformed exotic birds into even more exotic jeweled creations. The peacock and the sinister "Evil Eye" in the peacock's tail feathers became fashionable motifs in the 1870s and retained their evocative power through the turn of the century in depictions by numerous jewelers (Lots 305, 306 & 310). The stately white swan, symbol of pride and metamorphosis, drifted dreamily through designs of Art Nouveau jewels as in lots 315 and 316. The greatest innovation in Art Nouveau jewelry involved the fanciful portrayal of women. Until the advent of Art Nouveau, a woman's face rarely appeared in jewelry because it had been considered distasteful for a woman to ornament herself with the depiction of another woman. This was an idea that perhaps arose from the masculine character of the nineteenth century in which industrial growth, science and technology, and military might dominated the western consciousness. In liberation from this prevailing male emphasis, the female face and body dominated Art Nouveau jewelry. Woman represented all that was missing from an imbalanced world, and the extensive use of the female motif in Art Nouveau jewelry became almost an invocation for the restoration of harmony in life and art. (Lots 311 & 312). Women were often maidens or goddesses (Lots 288, 303, 320 & 321) depicted with long, waving hair and an air of sensuality-female entities in limbo between the real and the imagined. Art Nouveau jewels often brought together plants and birds in miniature landscapes. Very clearly showing the Japanese influence, water was usually a feature and in lot 314 it ripples in a lake. Sprawling roots and branches of trees compose the outline to this pendant. Among the many talented jewelers of this period one particular reputation shines above all the others, that of René Lalique. He proved himself the most prolifically inventive and imaginative designer, drawing together Symbolist and Art Nouveau themes into works of exceptional graphic grace and sophistication. He was a great technical innovator and his readiness to mix precious and non-precious stones, and the use of such material as horn, carved ivory, baroque pearls, amber and tortoiseshell, often in unexpected juxtaposition. He greatly extended the use of enamels, achieving exquisite results with translucent plique-à-jour enamels and with clever effects such as variegated textures and sparkling foil inclusions. Lalique provided the inspiration to a generation of jewelers. Among the many creations of Lalique in this sale, two masterpieces are particularly noteworthy. Lot 322 represents Narcissus and his reflection. Ovid's myth of the youth enamored of his own reflection was a central preoccupation of Symbolism and evokes a succession of paintings in this theme. Lot 308, a gold pendant and chain, shows lovers embracing within a bower of ivy. Ivy, which is green in winter, is a symbol of the enduring qualities of love. This piece, called "The Kiss", is quite without precedent in the history of jewelry design even though it paralleled the work of the painter Gustave Klimt and the sculptor August Rodin.

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A SUPERB BELLE EPOQUE OPAL PENDANT NECKLACE
Centering upon a heart-shaped opal pendant, within a calibré-cut sapphire, old European-cut diamond and blue enamelled frame, enhanced by sculpted scrolling gold iris motifs, suspended by twin diamond collet lines from a similarly-set fan-shaped surmount, to the backchain of alternating diamond collets and navette-shaped blue enamelled foliate motif links, joined to a smaller heart-shaped opal plaque within a sculpted gold iris motif frame, mounted in gold and platinum, (with three detachable links, may be joined together to form a bracelet), circa 1900, necklace adjustable from 9 to 20½ ins., bracelet 7¾ ins.
Numbered 24909