reputation. The traditions were maintained of either the 17th and 18th centuries or the style affected at the close of the second empire—light pierced work and design borrowed from natural flowers. The last type, introduced by Massin, had exercised, indeed, a revolutionary influence on the treatment of jewelry. This clever artist, not less skilful as a craftsman, produced a new genre by copying the grace and lightness of living blossoms, thus introducing a perfectly fresh element into the limited variety of traditional style, and by the use of filigree gold work altering its character and giving it greater elegance. Massin still held the first rank in the exhibition of 1878; he had a marked influence on his contemporaries, and his name will be remembered in the history of the goldsmith’s art to designate a style and a period. Throughout these years the craft was exclusively devoted to perfection of workmanship. The utmost finish was aimed at in the mounting and setting of gems; jewelry was, in fact, not so much an art as a high-class industry; individual effort and purpose were absent.
Fig. 31.
Up to that time precious stones had been of such intrinsic value that the jeweller’s chief skill lay in displaying these costly stones to the best advantage; the mounting was a secondary consideration. The settings were seldom long preserved in their original condition, but in the case of family jewels were renewed with each generation and each change of fashion, a state of things which could not be favourable to any truly artistic development of taste, since the work was doomed, sooner or later, to destruction. However, the evil led to its own remedy. As soon as diamonds fell in value they lost at the same time their overwhelming prestige, and refined taste could give a preference to trinkets which derived their value and character from artistic design. This revolutionized the jeweller’s craft, and revived the simple ornament of gold or silver, which came forward but timidly at first, till, in the Salon of 1895, it burst upon the world in the exhibits of René Lalique, an artist who was further confirmed in his remarkable position by the exhibition of 1900. What specially stamps the works of Lalique is their striking originality. His work may be considered from the point of view of design and from that of execution. As an artist he has completely reconstructed from the foundation the scheme of design which had fed the poverty-stricken imagination of the last generation of goldsmiths. He had recourse to the art of the past, but to the spirit rather than the letter, and to nature for many new elements of design—free double curves, suave or soft; opalescent harmonies of colouring; reminiscences, with quite a new feeling, of Egypt, Chaldea, Greece and the East, or of the art of the Renaissance; and infinite variety of floral forms even of the humblest. He introduces also the female nude in the form of sirens and sphinxes. As a craftsman he has effected a radical change, breaking through old routine, combining all the processes of the goldsmith, the chaser, the enameller and the gem-setter, and freeing himself from the narrow lines in which the art had been confined. He ignores the hierarchy of gems, caring no more on occasion for a diamond than for a flint, since, in his view, no stone, whatever its original estimation, has any value beyond the characteristic expression he lends it as a means to his end. Thus, while he sometimes uses diamonds, rubies, sapphires or emeralds as a background, he will, on the other hand, give a conspicuous position to common stones—carnelian, agate, malachite, jasper, coral, and even materials of no intrinsic value, such as horn. One of his favourite stones is the opal, which lends itself to his arrangements of colour, and which has in consequence become a fashionable stone in French jewelry.
In criticism of the art of Lalique and his school it should be observed that the works of the school are apt to be unsuited to the wear and tear of actual use, and inconveniently eccentric in their details. Moreover, the preciousness of the material is an almost inevitable consideration in the jeweller’s craft, and cannot be set at naught by the artist without violating the canons of his art.
