carving and casting : Cartier

Showing posts with label Cartier. Show all posts

Monday, November 20, 2017

NO TROPHY NEEDED

We don't know precisely when Gustav Manz made his first ring depicting a young elephant emerging from tall grass, but the year he spent working in South Africa's diamond fields as a young man in the late 1880s clearly was formative. A version of this ring appears in an early photograph of his own jewelry designs for customers such as Tiffany & Co, Cartier, and Black, Starr & Frost, many incorporating lions, tigers, bears and other wildlife.

After moving to New York in the early 1890s, Manz used his leisure time to sketch animals at the city's park zoos (where over time he earned enough trust from the keepers that he was permitted to borrow a mountain lion cub to study and sketch at his leisure). His miniature, highly realistic, representations of iconic species in precious metal became a hallmark and are highly coveted by collectors today.

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Tuesday, January 26, 2016

ARCTIC GEMS: GUSTAV MANZ'S POLAR BEAR EXPRESS

Anticipating "The Revenant"—a hundred years before the DiCaprio film—an ornament for a circa 1900s sterling card or accessories tray set with rock crystal. Marked F. Walter Lawrence Inc.
Image Dale Howell Antiques

On March 6, 1912, a decade after establishing himself as a designing jeweler and fabricator in New York City, Gustav Manz registered copyright for a sculptured group of polar bears on a hill of ice, staking his claim on the motif when icicles were hot thanks to the expeditions of Peary, Shackleton and Cook. The arctic fantasy shown above carries the hallmark of F. Walter Lawrence Inc. and is most likely also the work of Manz, who created other animal-themed accessories and silver novelties for Lawrence and others through the ensuing decades until Manz's retirement in the early 1940s.

Ink and gouache rendering of ring design by Gustav Manz, circa 1910. Mathews family collection

A scrap of inked parchment pasted in Manz's mountings book. Obscured by ancient glue, but unmistakably arctic. We're guessing 1909-11, when sales of polar bear items to Black, Starr & Frost, Tiffany & Co, Cartier and others are recorded in Manz's costbooks. A popular postcard issued by the New York Zoological Park from the same era shows a probable live model for the jeweler, who often made use of the zoo's caged studios for artists.

New York Zoological Park postcard showing one of two 800-pound polar bears captured at Kane Basin in July 1910. The pair, a male and female known as Silver King and Silver Queen, resided with their offspring at the Zoological Park into the 1920s

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Tuesday, June 2, 2015

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

In anticipation of this year's Belmont Stakes—where American Pharoah and his rider Victor Espinoza will race to end a 37-year drought on Triple Crown winners—we offer a collage of spirited stallions by Gustav Manz and others.

From top left: detail from manufacturing order for a Manz horse brooch and other jewelry, c. 1911 (Ferdinand Hotz stock book, courtesy Hotz family archives); yellow-gold and water-green tourmaline ring from F. Walter Lawrence's atelier, most likely carved by Manz (The Keystone, July 1905); Rosa Bonheur's iconic painting of the horse market held in Paris on the trued-lined Boulevard de l’Hôpital, completed in 1855 and given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1897. According to the Met's website, Bonheur sketched there twice a week for a year and a half, "dressing as a man to discourage attention."

Buyers for this and other equestrian motifs included Tiffany, Cartier, Shreve Crump & Low, T.B. Starr, F. Walter Lawrence, Udall & Ballou, Marcus & Company, Black, Starr & Frost, Bailey, Banks & Biddle

Image from "A Master Sculptor in Precious Metals"

Arts & Decoration, January 1926

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Tuesday, February 18, 2014

HORSE SENSE

Illustration from a profile of designer and manufacturing jeweler Gustav Manz ("A Master Sculptor in Precious Metals") featured in Arts and Decoration magazine, January 1926

In the late 19th century, Harlem River Drive was a popular racecourse for horse-drawn carriages. Known as the "Speedway," it ran along the river from 155th Street under the Washington Bridge (not to be confused with the George Washington Bridge, which spans the Hudson and opened in 1931) and up to Dyckman Street.

We don't know whether Gustav Manz, who lived in Washington Heights at that time, was fond of betting. That he was adept at carving equestrian motifs is clear from his business ledgers, which record sales of figural and diamond-studded items to Cartier, Tiffany & Co, Ferdinand Hotz (owner of the Maximilian Diamond), Udall & Ballou, Marcus & Co, Black Starr & Frost, T. B. Starr, Charlton, and Shreve Crump & Low.

Trotting along the Harlem River, 1903

Image from NYPL

Lucky horseshoes stickpins and brooches were an Edwardian favorite and turn up in Bailey, Banks & Biddle's ledger books, including one manufactured in 1908 by McTeigue, Manz & Co (Walter P. McTeigue and Gustav Manz). An accompanying sketch indicates 25 stones set in a alternating bands of sapphires and diamonds, evoking racing silks.

The lilliputian herd on a circa 1900s ring retailed by jeweler F. Walter Lawrence (shown below), evokes Rosa Bonheur's famous painting depicting the horse market in Paris. Manz's close association with Lawrence, and his own reputation as an animalièr who often placed his subjects in leafy surrounds, points to him as the likely carver.

Inspired by Rosa Bonheur's painting "The Horse Fair," this gold ring set with green tourmaline retailed by jewelry merchant F. Walter Lawrence, here attributed to designer-goldsmith Gustav Manz

Photo from The Keystone, July 1905, p 1073

Completed in 1855, Bonheur's scene of muscular Percherons barely restrained by their trainers as they circle a plaza was already famous by the time Cornelius Vanderbilt acquired the artwork in 1887 from department store magnate Alexander Turney Stewart and gave it to the Metropolitan Museum the following day. When the Met first opened its doors to the public on Sundays in 1891, the gigantic (8 x 16 1/2 foot!!) painting attracted tens of thousands of visitors.

The miniature frieze of stallions on the "Horse Fair" ring surely created a minor sensation when a photo of it ran in The Keystone in July 1905, shortly after the opening of Belmont Park. Another equine ring sold to Lawrence, depicting horse and trainer, is recorded Manz's cost book records in summer 1910. Due to anti-gambling legislation targeting horse racing, Belmont and other New York tracks closed that season. Perhaps, that season, Lawrence's customer wore it to Ascot or Longchamp.

Entry in Manz's costbook for a gold and lapis seal ring with "Horse & trainer group" carved on the mounting, sold to F.W. Lawrence on June 2, 1910

Courtesy Winterthur Museum Library

GUSTAV MANZ LLC

Monday, November 5, 2012

"YOU CAN'T CRY ON A DIAMOND'S SHOULDER" — Elizabeth Taylor

Talk about gem lust. Here's actor Richard Burton licking his chops after a conquest (from his diaries, published this week by Yale University Press):

[November 1969]

Saturday 1st, Gstaad I bought the ring for Elizabeth. I had set a 'lid' on it of one million dollars if thou pleasest and Cartier outbid me by $50,000...bugger Cartiers, I was going to get that diamond if it cost me my life or 2 million dollars whichever was the greater. [The next day Burton negotiated with Cartier to buy the stone.] For 24 hours the agony persisted and in the end I won. I got the bloody thing. For $1,100,000...It turns out that one of my rivals was Ari Onassis but he chickened at $700,000. But apart from the fact that I am a natural winner, I wanted that diamond because it is incomparably lovely. And it should be on the loveliest woman in the world. I would have had a fit if it went to Jackie Kennedy or Sophia Loren or Mrs. Huntingdon Misfit of Dallas, Texas....

Postscript: After the couple divorced in 1978, Taylor auctioned the 69.42 carat stone (known as the Taylor-Burton Diamond); Taylor reportedly earmarked the $5 million proceeds from the sale to help build a hospital in Botswana.

Shoulder to shoulder: Richard and Elizabeth

17 November 1969

(Courtesy Yale University Press)

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GUSTAV MANZ LLC

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Monday, August 13, 2012

THE JEWELER'S DAUGHTER

Born in 1903 on the Fourth of July, Doris Rosalie Manz was the younger of Gustav Manz's two daughters with his first wife Martha Bachem. In a circa 1920s studio photo (detail above), Doris wears a Chinese style dress, and a ring stack that includes one of her father's designs for a bezel-set cabochon jade, as well as a link bracelet with tassels wound around her wrist. By her late teens she'd not only become fashion-conscious but was acting as her father's sales agent, picking up knowledge of gems for mounting from people she called on in the trade, such as young Harry Winston, Witherbee Black of Black, Starr & Frost, and George Frederick Kunz of Tiffany & Co.

Stylish, gregarious, and ambitious, Doris inevitably came onto the radar of Neysa McMein, the illustrator responsible for McCall's magazine's American Beauty series and a friend of sculptor Sally James Farnham, who was a personal acquaintance and customer of Doris's father. The resulting cover portrait—showing Doris with a wavy bob, representing the "The Scandinavian American Girl"—appeared on the magazine's November 1924 issue. (Surely an issue worth splurging a Liberty head dime on!)

Decades after Manz's business archive was donated to Winterthur Museum, one of Doris's business cards was discovered pasted inside her personal copy of George F. Kunz's Rings for the Finger. The author's inscription on the flyleaf reads:

For

Miss Doris Manz,

In appreciation of a

friend of her father

the author

George Frederick Kunz

27 August 1920

New York

Beside his signature, Kunz sketched a hieroglyph or rune engraved upon a stone. We'd give anything to know whether Tiffany's swashbuckling gemologist was merely showing off his calligraphy or offering a secret handshake to a young woman seeking to rise and prosper in the field her immigrant father (as well as her maternal grandparents, diamond ring manufacturers in Newark) had chosen.

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Thursday, June 7, 2012

GUNDA RISES TO THE OCCASION

GUSTAV MANZ™

Her big ears mark her as African. Also her tusks: Only males of the Asiatic species grow ivory. Nonetheless, we nicknamed this bracelet Gunda to honor the spirit of the wild-caught Asian male elephant that was a star attraction at New York Zoological Park (aka Bronx Zoo) in the early 1900s, when William Temple Hornaday was director.

The bangle's ornament, replicated from an original Manz casting, derives from his design for a platinum and pave-set diamond elephant brooch. Variations of the pin were made for Cartier, Black Starr & Frost, Udall & Balllou and others in the 1920s.

Production notes for platinum and diamond elephant brooch,

pave-set with 80 stones, sold to Cartier on September 19, 1925

Gustav Manz stockbook, Winterthur

The Gunda Bangle (top and above)
GUSTAV MANZ™

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GUSTAV MANZ LLC

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All images (c) Gustav Manz LLC

Thursday, March 22, 2012

THAT DARN CAT! Classic felines by Gustav Manz

Pencil ring design from Gustav Manz jewelry ledger; purchased by Pickslay & Company, circa 1911
Gustav Manz archive, Wintherthur Library

Before Cartier's Jeanne Toussaint thought of placing a friendly spotted panthère on cabochon emeralds—or having one jump through hoops, as seen in the firm's recent promo video—quite a few jungle cats loped through glittering cases on New York's Fifth Avenue, and Boston's Washington Street, and Jewelers Row in Chicago. A good number of them, such as the panther confronting a snake in the drawing above, were designed and executed in gold or sterling silver by the early 20th century animalier and jewelry maker Gustav Manz.

Panthere clip-brooch designed circa 1948 by Cartier's Jeanne Toussaint (Duchess of Windsor collection)

Image copyright Cartier

Okay, we'll admit, L'Odyssée de Cartier IS pretty great marketing candy. It reminds us of the sleepy princess in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Tinder Box"—carried away on the back of a sleek cat rather than a dish-eyed dog... We were equally awestruck when one of Gustav Manz's rare carved panther rings surfaced at Skinner's recent fine jewelry sale this month.

A Star Sapphire and 14K Gold Panther and Snake ring attributed to Gustav Manz, offered at Skinner's Fine Jewelry Sale, June 14, 2011

Lot 238 carried us back to April 1904, when Manz's hand-wrought gold and sapphire panther ring appeared at the Fine Arts pavilion at the St. Louis world's fair, along with dozens of other pieces he executed for jeweler F. Walter Lawrence's exhibit case. An unnamed fairgoer purchased the ring according to archived correspondence between Lawrence and Halsey C. Ives, Chief of the Department of Art at the expo.

The gold ring depicting a tiger swiping at a snake in the grass shown above was included in Manz's display at the 8th Exhibit of Industrial Arts held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and appeared on the opening page of The Jewelers' Circular coverage of the show in January 1924. The typesetter inadvertently printed it upside down; nonetheless it was one of his bestselling designs.

Above: Manz sketch for a ring with cabochon sapphire, sold to Moore & Mason, 1925; below, Manz sales record for a panther and snake ring purchased by Tiffany & Co in 1913; bottom, drawing of a panther stickpin set with a cabochon gem from Manz's design scrapbook
Image copyright Gustav Manz LLC

Manz's business ledgers from 1910-1925 show multiple variations of jungle cats poised to pounce, stalking snakes and other characteristic poses—on men's rings and sleeve-links and scarf-pins, with cabochon or calibre stones. Buyers included Tiffany & Company, Shreve, Crump & Low, Pickslay & Co, and other bespoke jewelry merchants. Manz's artful evocation of nature tooth and claw evidently spoke to gentlemen and sportsmen of the Gilded Age. You could say they, like Andersen's and Cartier's princess, were carried away.

Check out other historic Gustav Manz jewelry designs on this blog. Below: a transporting moment from Kay Nielsen's circa 1930 illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen's "The Tinder Box"