Cover Jean Schlumberger, the most audaciously successful designer at Tiffany & Co (Photo: courtesy of Tiffany & Co)
Jean Schlumberger, the most audaciously successful designer at Tiffany & Co (Photo: courtesy of Tiffany & Co)
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Tiffany & Co and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs have begun conserving 10,000 sheets from the archive of Jean Schlumberger, one of the maison’s most prolific—and fun--collaborators
Tiffany & Co’s presentation at this year’s Paris Fashion Week was named I Am Only a Pencil. The title could easily have been taken for modesty, yet it is an accurate account of how Jean Schlumberger, the brand’s most audaciously successful designer, worked. Schlumberger, who joined the New York jeweller in 1956, never trained at the bench, and his ideas took shape on paper long before they reached the workshop, where setters and goldsmiths were often left to solve problems that a trained jeweller would have known to avoid.
Schlumberger was an artist first, so the paper he drew on forms part of his practice. Through a multi-year initiative led by The Tiffany Archives, Tiffany & Co and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs are conserving and digitally imaging around 5,000 of Schlumberger’s original drawings and a similar number of archival documents. The presentation, staged with input from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, marked the start of the project.
Unlike paper, jewellery is often seen as permanent, but this is misleading. Stones are reset, mounts remade and gold melted down and reworked whenever taste moves on, so a piece we hold today might not necessarily reflect the original intention. The drawing is often the only surviving record of that intention, preserving the proportions the designer wanted, the colour he imagined before a stone dealer had an opinion, and the lines he tried and abandoned. When a jewel is lost, the object is gone; when the drawing behind it is lost, so is the reasoning that explains why the jewel looks the way it does.
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Above Jasmine necklace sketch by Jean Schlumberger (Photo: courtesy of Tiffany & Co)
Above Jasmine necklace (Photo: courtesy of The Virginia museum of fine arts, estate of Mrs Paul Mellon / Tiffany & Co)
Jasmine necklace sketch by Jean Schlumberger (Photo: courtesy of Tiffany & Co)
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Victoria Reynolds, chief gemologist at Tiffany & Co, puts Schlumberger’s lack of formal instruction at the centre of the story. “As Schlumberger was not trained as a jeweller, his freedom to render without worrying about the technical constraints of creating these jewels allowed his imagination to soar,” she says. Take, for example, paillonné enamel. The technique, which layers translucent enamel over tiny pieces of gold foil, belonged more to 19th-century objets than to mid-century jewellery. But Schlumberger revived it for his enamel bangles, which became so closely associated with Jacqueline Kennedy that the trade still calls them “Jackie bracelets”. A jeweller schooled in the conventions of the period might well have dismissed the technique as obsolete, but Schlumberger had no such training to hold him back.
It was then necessary for the workshop then to bridge his flights of imagination with practical reality. “His designs demanded exceptional technical sophistication, from intricate wirework and unconventional combinations of gold and platinum to complex gemstone settings and paillonné enamel,” she adds. “He partnered with exceptional jewellers and setters to bring his creations to life.”
Above Victoria Reynolds, chief gemologist at Tiffany & Co (Photo: courtesy of Tiffany & Co)
Victoria Reynolds, chief gemologist at Tiffany & Co (Photo: courtesy of Tiffany & Co)
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Born in Mulhouse into a textile family, Schlumberger made buttons and costume pieces for Surrealist couturier Elsa Schiaparelli in 1930s Paris, and moved in the same circles as the artists she collaborated with. The later rooms of this year’s presentation trace that inheritance, with one gallery devoted to his Surrealist-inspired objets d’art and another to the influence of couture on his jewellery. His sea creatures, birds and plants were never intended as botanical illustration; they are nature redrawn by someone who spent the formative years of his career surrounded by those whose work reflected their unconscious minds.
Reynolds says Schlumberger’s approach to stones reflected his artistic background. “He selected his gemstones for their beauty,” she says. “He was not concerned with their singular value but rather how they spoke to his colour sensibility and whether they could enhance his creations. He used gemstones in the same way a painter would use paints.”
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Above Bird on a Rock (Photo: courtesy of The Virginia museum of fine arts, estate of Mrs Paul Mellon / Tiffany & Co)
Above Bird on a Rock sketch by Jean Schlumberger (Photo: courtesy of Tiffany & Co)
Bird on a Rock (Photo: courtesy of The Virginia museum of fine arts, estate of Mrs Paul Mellon / Tiffany & Co)
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The Hedges and Rows necklace, for example, sets unenhanced yellow sapphires alongside diamonds and cabochon turquoise; a gemologist would immediately spot that the sapphires used are unenhanced, yet heat treatment was already routine at the time the piece was made. The turquoise, meanwhile, an opaque and comparatively humble material, yet Schlumberger cut it as a cabochon and placed it beside faceted sapphires and diamonds as an equal. Most high jewellery of the period followed a strict hierarchy of value, with the largest and costliest stone at the centre and everything else in a supporting role, but in this necklace, it is colour that decides the composition and the stones that serve it.
The jewels on display in Paris include pieces once owned by Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, the horticulturalist and philanthropist who was Schlumberger’s close friend and most devoted collector. “Bunny Mellon was much more than a client—she was his patron and muse,” Reynolds says. “Her singular collection provides us with a window into their combined sensibilities and extraordinary taste.” Among the Mellon pieces is one of the first Bird on a Rock brooches, in which the bird is perched on a piece of lapis lazuli. The choice of stone is significant—later versions of the design were famed for large and important centre stones, but the original idea set the bird on a mineral chosen for its colour.
Mermaid (Photo: courtesy of The Virginia museum of fine arts, estate of Mrs Paul Mellon / Tiffany & Co)
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Bird on a Rock, which entered the Tiffany catalogue in 1965, forms the closing chapter of the presentation and offers the clearest sign that the archive is meant to be used rather than kept under glass. Tiffany has continued to reinterpret the design, most recently under Nathalie Verdeille, the house’s chief artistic officer for jewellery and high jewellery. Reynolds describes the brief as staying “true to its original spirit while bringing a fresh perspective”, with coloured stones selected to prompt each new version. This is the point at which conservation becomes more than an act of heritage; once the 10,000 sheets have been stabilised and imaged, today’s design studio will be able to study Schlumberger’s first thoughts, not just the finished works that his successors have spent 60 years reissuing.
Reynolds hopes that young designers joining the studio will take away “a rare glimpse into [Schlumberger’s] creative process”, and that seeing sketch and jewel side by side will demonstrate both the freedom the designer allowed himself and how much skill was needed to do justice to it. Nearly 70 years after Schlumberger first put pencil to paper for Tiffany & Co, the house has recognised that those drawings are the part of his legacy most in need of saving.
As the Regional Editor for Watches and Jewellery and Editorial Content Lead for Tatler GMT, Amrita Katara specialises in luxury watch and jewellery coverage across Asia, with expertise in editorial strategy, feature writing and interviews with industry leaders. Her past roles span luxury lifestyle media and client partnerships. Based in Mumbai, Amrita’s work bridges global trends and Asian market insights.
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