French Jewelry of the Nineteenth Century

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Henri Vever

Thames & Hudson, London, 2001, English

Nonfiction, Jewelry Design

ISBN: 9780500237847

From the Publisher. Vever’s La Bijouterie Française au XIXe Siècle was first published in France between 1906 and 1908: it has been the bible of all jewelry experts, buyers, sellers, scholars, and historians ever since. Only 1,000 copies were originally produced, and it has been out of print for many years, appearing only rarely in the auction houses where it fetches very large sums.

This volumethe first ever complete translation into English—includes over 1,400 illustrations: photographs, sketches for jewels, and prints from fashion magazines; 136 color photographs of jewels now in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs are new to this edition.

All the great and now more obscure jewelers are included in the text and illustrations: Alphonse Fouquet, Boucheron, Falize, Froment-Maurice, Cartier, Chaumet, Georges Fouquet, Gaillard, Vever, Lalique, and many many more.

The discussion in the text is not only of the individual jewels and types of jewelry, but also includes many entertaining anecdotes about the jewelers’ relations with their customers and with society in general. Being himself a jeweler, Henri Vever was able to talk personally with all the people he writes about (or their followers), so the book has an unusual degree of authority.

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Marion Fasel

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An Art Nouveau jewelry designer, artist, and author, Henri Vever produced this seminal book over 100 years ago in French, but it has been translated into English only relatively recently. It reviews masterpieces from the turn of the century at the time when this revolutionary work was created.

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