Modern Jewellery and Art. 7 



MODERN JEWELLERY AND ART. 



BY WILLIAM DTJTHIE. 



Although the associations which connect jewellery with art 

 are very strong, it does not necessarily follow that the con- 

 nection itself is an intimate one. These associations are in 

 part traditional, and in part the result of the charm which the 

 materials of jewellery in themselves, by their natural beauty, 

 exert over the mind in an sesthetic sense. Gems, gold, and 

 silver suggest ornament, and ornament implies art, but the 

 union between the two things — the harmonious blending of 

 form and material — is often sadly imperfect. Perhaps no work- 

 man, in modern times, has employed the materials placed at 

 his hand to so little advantage, in an artistic sense, as the 

 jeweller. What art has done within the last quarter of a 

 century in stone and wood, and the coarser, cheaper metals, is 

 something admirable. It has moved the architect, the 

 sculptor, the wood-carver, the modeller and founder in brass 

 and iron, to efforts and results which will assuredly be remem- 

 bered in future days ; and has helped on the nation in its great 

 course of sesthetic progress and refinement. But nothing of 

 this kind can be said of the jeweller, who has been content to 

 produce lame, mongrel copies of ancient art productions ; has 

 dealt in the slang and vulgarities, as it were, of daily life, 

 epitomized into gold, and garnished with gems to serve as pin 

 or brooch ; or who has gone to the ironmonger and the brass- 

 founder for his newest patterns. 



It is surely time that this cause of reproach should be 

 removed. Something has already been done in the way of 

 improvement in design in jewellery — not a word of fault- 

 finding should be said as to execution — and it is only necessary 

 to arouse the public themselves to the deficiencies of this 

 branch of art, to ensure their correction. It is, in fact, the 

 public who are chiefly to blame for the monstrosities which 

 disfigure the jewellers' show-windows, and with which they, the 

 public, esteem themselves to be adorned. The artizan must, 

 as a matter of necessity, produce that which will sell, or the 

 shopkeeper will not accept of it ; and the shopkeeper's chief 

 art is to discover the idiosyncrasies of taste of his customers, 

 and this he does with a wonderful aptitude. The jeweller may 

 appear in some cases to lead the public taste, but he can only 

 do so by pleasing it; and if he make what in commercial 

 phrase is a " hit," in the production of some grotesque article 

 of jewellery — grotesque in its attempted originality, or vulgar 

 in its imitation of something in ordinary use — it is the taste of 



