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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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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PEEPING THROUGH PIN HOLES: GUSTAV MANZ'S FLAPPER JEWELRY

Gustav Manz's jewelry archives at Winterthur record many of the pieces he produced for Tiffany & Company from the Edwardian period through the Jazz Age. Shown here is a jade, enamel and seed pearl bar pin fabricated in spring 1923—about two years before Fitzgerald finished his Great American Novel. Sufficiently vintage, we'd say, for a stroll down the red carpet. (If you have information on where this "broche" might be found, please write to us!)  

Raising the bar: jade and enamel brooch 

Gustav Manz for Tiffany & Co, circa 1923

Photo (c) Gustav Manz LLC 

The Tiffany & Co jewelry archives recently proved an invaluable resource "in looking back at this Golden Era of affluence..." according to costume designer Catherine Martin, who is collaborating with husband/filmmaker Baz Luhrmann on a remake of The Great Gatsby. Tiffany & Co has been tasked with recreating period bling for the film's star-studded cast led by Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan), Leonardo DiCaprio (Gatsby), and Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway). 

Carey Mulligan (Daisy Buchanan) having what appears to be a bad wig day on the set of The Great Gatsby; but love her pearl and diamond ear-vices 

Photo via CelebBuzz 

While jewelry hardly gets mentioned in Fitzgerald's novel ("It's the funniest thing, old sport"), one of the saddest, most memorable scenes in the book occurs when Daisy smoothes her hair with a brush from Gatsby's "toilet set of pure dull gold..."

An Edwardian lady's gold toilet set

(image courtesy of Christie's) 

Women of the pre-World War One decade began to shift away from the oversize collars favored by stylish turn-of-the-century ladies: "It may be surprising to hear that Dutch collar pins have gone," observed The New York Times' fashion correspondent.  It is only the name, however, that has passed. Pierrot pins have taken their place. The fan-shaped Pierrot pin has the advantage of following the lines of the frock where it meets the throat. Bar pins are in the ascendancy."

This silk crepe dress from the 20s, advertised on Etsy (@ Veronica in Canada), has small holes at the neckline and on the front left side—brooch stigmata

By the 1920s, fussy collars were totally out and dress brooches or clips became popular, sometimes offered as door prizes or, if a hostess was particularly generous, as party favors. Pin stems in any era inevitably do damage to garments, so it probably took a Daisy Buchanan mentality to wear them on diaphanous flapper dresses and not worry about rending the fabric ("They were careless people, Tom and Daisy...")... 

On the red carpet at the 2012 Academy Awards ceremony, Michelle Williams cinched the Oscar for Best Accessory with a diminutive diamond bow pin 

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Copyright © Laura Mathews, 2014 
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 GUSTAV MANZ LLC

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AMERICAN BEAUTIES

Sally James Farnham posed in front of a Peacock Screen, circa 1906, for this portrait by her cousin Charles Chapman, a Manz neighbor in the Leonia, New Jersey artists colony. Image courtesy Michael Reed, sallyjamesfarnham.org

Gustav Manz's jewelry log records sale of a Zodiac Band Ring to "Mrs. Farnham" in 1916. Sally James Farnham had recently separated from husband Paulding Farnham, whose neoclassical jewelry and metalwork designs for Tiffany & Co won the firm accolades at many international exhibitions.  Farnham was undoubtedly aware of Manz's jewelry as his workshop supplied Tiffany and other fine jewelers around town. Gustav and Sally were both animalier sculptors, so there was a personal as well as professional acquaintance. 

Ink on parchment sketch for a zodiac ring 
Gustav Manz ledger, circa 1916-1917

Image (c) Gustav Manz LLC

The Zodiac ring echoed the fancy cigarette case Farnham had presented to her husband for his 42nd birthday in November 1901; the couple shared the same birth month (Sally's birthday fell on November 26), and the case incorporated both the Farnham crest carved into a cabochon sapphire centered on one side paired with a beautifully modeled Centaur aiming his bow and arrow on the other—an allusion to Sally's astrological sign and passion for horses. 

Gold, silver, sapphire cigarette case inscribed "Paulding Farnham New York from S.J.F., Nov. 6, 1901. Interior marked Tiffany & Co. Image Sotheby''s

A few years after receiving the cigarette case, Paulding Farnham resigned from Tiffany & Co, and moved out west, where he mounted a second career as a maritime painter and made unlucky investments in mining. Left with three children to support, Sally filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment (granted in 1915), and stepped up her productivity—helped along by good connections (Frederic Remington was a mentor), and public interest in the the novelty of a socially prominent mother of three getting her hands into clay and plaster. As the Gilded Age waned, the Sculptress got busy.

The year 1916 began inauspiciously when the statue she'd proposed for a public garden in Philadelphia, depicting astronomer and inventor David Rittenhouse, was cancelled due to the death of the monument's primary financial backer. Her big break came in August 1916, when she won a $24,000 commission to create a monument to Simon Bolivar. Her scheme for a statue of the liberator of the Spanish colonies dressed in full military regalia, astride a horse lifting its hoof, beat out a field of 20 artists. 

Perhaps the Manz Zodiac ring was a gift to herself in her 46th year.

She's got the horse right here: Farnham stands under Bolivar statue
 in a borrowed studio. The sculpture currently stands sentry near Artists' Gate in Central Park at 59th Street and Avenue of the Americas

Image: Smithsonian Institution, Peter A. Juley & Son Collection

As the Bolivar monument was unveiled, art critic Alexander Woollcott enthused that the work was "the [largest] by a woman which history anywhere records"; more noteworthy was Farnham's lack of experience, in comparison with the other entrants: "The great Bolivar is the work of an unschooled, self-taught artist who never had a lesson in her life and, what is more, it is the work of one who was a grown woman, the mother of two children, before she did her first modeling; indeed before the idea of being a sculptor at all ever entered her much-preoccupied head..." (More on Sally's career at Smithsonian blog.) 

Farnham and Woollcott were chummy with another prominent female artist of the 1920s, Neysa McMein, whose pastel portraits of modern American girls were in demand for magazine covers and advertising campaigns. Perhaps it was Farnham who suggested Gustav's daughter Doris pose for one of McMein's covers for McCall's famous series capturing the diverse "types" of American beauty (a pseudo-ethnographic campaign sparked, no doubt, by the resurgence of eugenics movements following the first world war). McMein cast (or miscast) fair-haired Doris, child of German immigrant parents from the Black Forest region, as "The Scandinavian Beauty."

Neysa McMein finishing a  cover illustration for McCall's magazine. In 1936, McMein designed the first official image of Betty Crocker.

Photo: Grapefruit Moon Gallery 

Doris had entered the family business at age 17 or younger, initially as sales rep for her father then as a diamond broker selling stones to Cartier, young Harry Winston, and Black Starr & Frost. Ggrowing up in Leonia, New Jersey, she'd posed for Sally Farnham's cousin, the artst Charles Shepard Chapman—a Manz neighbor and co-founder of the Leonia School of Illustration. McMein's portrait captures Doris as she must have looked seated on a train bound for Chicago or Hot Springs or Palm Beach, carrying a suitcase of her father's jewelry samples, her own business card, and a snappy sales pitch. Hoping, perhaps, that on the way she'd meet a dashing Centaur of her own.

At 20, Manz's younger daughter, Doris, posed for Neysa McMein's "American Beauty" series. Her portrait appeared on the November 1924 cover

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Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved 

 GUSTAV MANZ LLC

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Our thanks as always to Kay Olson Freeman for insights about Farnham's work and to Michael Reed, director of the Sally James Farnham website, for sharing sketches possibly related to Farnham's submission to the Philadelphia public monument competition.