BIRDS OF A FEATHER

                                   

Design for a silver or white gold peacock ornament, c. 1900

Gustav Manz design book (Mathews family collection). Manz's costbooks include a production sketch of a similar pendant fabricated for New York decorator and jeweler Edith Douglas Deane
Design (c) Gustav Manz LLC

During the years preceding World War I, beauty was the thing with feathers—especially in iridescent peacock shades (except in millinery, where ostrich plumes ruled, and fetched nearly as much as diamonds by weight until the global trade crashed in 1914). In 1904 Charles Freer had purchased the Peacock Dining Room his friend James McNeill Whistler had designed for a client, then had the chamber and its appointments dismantled and shipped home to Detroit to house his art pottery collection. In 1911 D.H. Lawrence borrowed the title for his first novel, The White Peacock, from the rare pale Indian Blue bird. 

Manz's production sketch for a carved diamond set platinum peacock pendant with colored stones. Made for Tiffany & Company 1910 -1915

Gustav Manz archive, Winterthur Museum Library

In the jewelry trade, Gustav Manz was sculpting peacock feathers in gold, platinum, and silver, embellishing the vanes with diamonds or colored stones or both. He carved peacocks into pendants and rings for Tiffany & Company as well as for private customers. F. Walter Lawrence's display for a jewelry show at the National Arts Club in 1903 featured a large case of articles mostly executed by Manz including: “... a fine conventionalized peacock for a breast ornament, the eyes in the separate feathers formed of colored jewels...” (De Kay, "An Exhibit of Jewelry," NYT, November 20, 1903; also featured in F. Walter Lawrence, "Symbolism in Jewelry," Town & Country, December 12, 1903). When Lawrence sent three dozen pieces to the St. Louis World's Fair the following spring, Manz received credit in the official catalog as the goldsmith responsible for the work—a rare acknowledgment of the craftsman on whose skills the firm's reputation depended. 

Peacock ornament, circa 1903, created by Gustav Manz for F. Walter Lawrence, a salon jeweler formerly associated with Marcus & Company, The pendant shown above and below appeared in an article about jewels featured in Lawrence's salon, the majority of which were produced by Manz. Image from Irene Sargent's "A Goldsmith-Sculptor" :The Keystone July 1905

In May 1915, Edith Douglas Deane, a prominent New York interior decorator and designer of "particularly artistic jewelry" (Who's Who of America, 1914) ordered or picked up a silver peacock pendant from Manz's workshop at 37 East 28th Street. A production sketch of the pendant pasted in Manz's costbook illustrates a peacock with tail feathers partially encircling a blue-green oval Amazonite cabochon. 

Peacock fever spreads to readers of 
Good Housekeeping (February 1902)

A graduate of New York School of Applied Design for Women (founded by Ellen Dunlap Hopkins), Deane was the daughter of lawyer and realtor John Hall Deane, who served as a trustee at Vassar (Edith's alma mater) as well as the University of Rochester (his alma mater), and was a major benefactor to Calvary Baptist Church—where he once dropped $100,000 into the collection plate (no doubt following Andrew Carnegie's dictum that "It is a crime to die rich"). At her Madison Avenue showroom Edith traded precious and semi-precious stones as well as decorating hints, and was the source for turquoise scarabs set into a collar Manz created for another well-heeled client, Elinor Evans Klapp, who also designed jewelry as well as interiors.

By the early 1920s, Deane was associated with the Manhattan decorating firm of J.C. Demarest & Co., contributing occasional pieces to The Modern Priscilla and Today's Housewife and lecturing at Women's Clubs on topics such as "Historic Influences on Modern Furniture in the American House" and "The Use and Abuse of Period Rooms and Furniture"...perhaps wearing the feathery pendant carved by her go-to jeweler.

Deane served as contributing editor for Today's Housewife (cover illustration by Ruth Eastman Rodgers); a 1925 advertisement in The New Yorker promoted Deane's lecture series (probably placed by the James B. Pond bureau, which booked her speaking engagements) 

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