The Gold Menagerie: A Century of Animal Jewellery

Animals have long been a design inspiration for jewellery.  Insects and reptiles were probably the first to appear, with beetles and snakes in particular often featured in ancient Egyptian jewellery.  Following antiquity animal forms in jewellery largely disappear until the mid-nineteenth century, replaced in the interim by human figures, flowers, and abstract forms.  Even with their re-emergence, there was first a proliferation of serpents and insects, in part inspired by jewellery found in archaeological finds throughout the Mediterranean.  However, soon after, ushered in by the sentimentalism of the latter half of the nineteenth century, animals chosen for their sheer charm began to be featured, including dogs, cats, foxes, horses, ducks, and rabbits.  These ‘novelties’, as they were then called, experienced a brief period of retirement during the First and Second World Wars, but came back into fashion with a vengeance in the nineteen forties. This time the animals were much less naturalistically rendered, perhaps inspired by cartoons, which were becoming increasing popular, such as those produced  by Walt Disney.  The trend carried on throughout the nineteen fifties, sixties, and seventies, and animal jewels were made by all the major jewellers, including Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, Tiffany, and Mauboussin.  Ever fun and easy to wear, they are now highly collectable.