HONEY BEARS

Sketch of gold bear ring mounting set with a star sapphire designed by Gustav Manz, purchased in 1918 by an executive from Walter P. McTeigue & Co.

(Gustav Manz archive, Winterthur)

Ah, November. Before you and your honeybunch hibernate, have a look at these Manz bears 

ROLLING STONES

 

Circa 1920s deco dress clip. Photo in Gustav Manz archive, Winterthur Library, Joseph Downs Collection

"Kissing your hand may make you feel 
very very good, but a diamond and 
safire (sic) bracelet lasts forever." 

—Anita Loos

A diamond clip with Greek Key motif identical to the one shown above appears in a circa 1932 sales catalog for liquidation of jewels formerly owned by the elder son of Thomas Kirkpatrick, founder of the old New York firm T. Kirkpatrick & Co. Two hundred and ten round and 18 baguette stones radiate from a pair of stylized banded fleur de lys where the two halves meet (raising the total by an additional 2 baguettes and 12 rounds). The maker, Gustav Manz, was a long-time supplier to Kirkpatrick, and other Gilded-to-Deco era retailers.

Greek key ring mounting designed by Gustav Manz 

circa 1905-1920

Manz's father-in-law and business partner Charles (Carl) Bachem was a manufacturing jeweler who'd emigrated from Pforzheim to open a diamond ring factory in Newark in 1892. For "convenience of the trade," Bachem distributed his cluster heads through Maiden Lane diamond setters John C. Nordt and Gottfried Heppdin. (To this day, descendants of Nordt fabricate ring blanks for the trade.) 

"Superior to Anything Ever Shown" 
(Jewelers' Circular, February 1897)

Shortly after moving the factory to Maiden Lane in 1899, Bachem retired for health reasons, turning the reins over to his son-in-law and his own wife, Sophie, who soon after reincorporated as Manz & Co. The pair were soon joined by Walter P. McTeigue (another manufacturing jeweler who'd recently split from his partner), producing "fine diamond and carved jewelry" that was carried by premier merchants in Philadelphia, Palm Beach, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., as well as elite retailers along Ladies' Mile. Six years later, Manz split off from McTeigue to set up on his own account. 

1920s diamond ring, marked Gillot & Co, engraved with stylized fleur de lys along shank and laurel leaves on prongs. Paul Gillot—a former design associate with Marcus &amp—frequently purchased mountings from Manz's studio

 (Photo courtesy Erie Basin)

By 1925, the same year Harper's Bazaar serialized Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Manz had moved his business to its final location in Manhattan's new jewelry district above 42nd Street, a convenience for his best clients—Tiffany, Black Starr & Frost, Marcus, Kirkpatrick, and Pickslay & Co—who'd followed their affluent customers from lower to upper Fifth Avenue in much the same spirit as Loos' practical-minded heroine Lorelei Lee.

"Any girl who was a lady would not even think 

of having such a good time that she did 

not remember to hang on to her jewelry." 

—Anita Loos

                    Copyright ©  2014 | All Rights Reserved 
                                             GUSTAV MANZ LLC

GIRLS WITH PEARL EARRINGS

Frau with a pearl earring: Sophie Bachem, 
diamond broker, circa 1890
Photo private collection

Gustav's mother-in-law and longtime business partner, Sophie Bachem (née Müller), emigrated from Germany in October 1892 with four of her five children (her eldest son arrived the following summer after completing his schooling). Sophie's husband, Carl, was variously a manufacturing jeweler, diamond broker and traveling merchant. Before emigrating he'd been associated with Lorenz Bissinger, a Pforzheim fabricator, and patented several designs for jewelry findings. He arrived ahead of his family by a few months and opened a diamond ring factory on Mulberry Street in Newark. 

Sophie's husband Carl (Chas.) Bachem 

with one of his jewelry patents,

Photo private collection

When Sophie arrived, the family moved into a block of row houses in Hamilton Heights, at the northern end of Manhattan. By the late 1890s, Carl, who'd anglicized his name to Charles, was beset with ill health and business difficulties. Sensing her spouse might not recover from his ailment (he ultimately sought treatment in Germany, and died there around 1904), Sophie arranged a hasty marriage between her middle daughter, Martha Magdalena and Gustav Manz, a designing jeweler and sculptor with a studio near Union Square. Shortly before their nuptials Manz was made junior partner at Chas. Bachem & Co at 41-43 Maiden Lane. In 1901, with Carl's retirement and Sophie's backing, the firm was renamed Manz & Co. 

             Gustav Manz and bride, Martha Bachem, circa 1899 
                               Photo private collection

The 34-year-old goldsmith and his 17-year-old bride were a mismatch from the get-go, though their union did produce two daughters (the younger entered the business as a gem-broker and traveling saleswoman). By 1903, they'd built a roomy house in Leonia, an old farming community on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River that had morphed into an artists' enclave. But after a few years—during which Gustav was admitted to the National Arts Club while Martha joined the circle of her socialist-leaning Hungarian violin teacher—the couple were estranged and eventually divorced. (Both would re-marry, more harmoniously.)

Sophie's son-in-law Gustav Manz purchased a house in Leonia, NJ the early 1900s. The shingle-style cottage was designed by local architect Fred West, who'd trained at McKim, Mead & White and was an early member of the Leonia artist colony
Photo private collection 

  Leonia train station, circa 1918 
Photo courtesy Leonia Historical Society

Gustav eventually moved back to Manhattan while Martha, whose formal schooling ended in tenth grade, kept the house on Christie Street. While newly separated she'd worked briefly as a department store clerk and sold encyclopedias door to door; as a young mother she earned money as a local correspondent for The Bergen Record. In 1922, buoyed by the Supreme Court upholding of the Nineteenth Amendment—and now married to her violin instructor, with whom she'd had two more children—Martha found investors to help launch Leonia Life, one of the first weekly newspapers in the country published and edited by a woman.

Through all this domestic upheaval, Sophie Bachem maintained her stake in Manz & Co., joining her son-in-law when he and Walter P. McTeigue, another manufacturing jeweler, formed McTeigue, Manz & Co., situating their business in the new Mercantile Building at 31-33 West 31st Street. Sophie's younger son, Hans, served as salesman. When the partners set up independent concerns (Manz's studio specialized in carved mountings for precious and semi-precious stones; McTeigue's factory produced primarily platinum jewelry), Sophie maintained an office in the heart of the Diamond District, buying and selling stones. She retired shortly after Hans' death in October 1912, having been active in the jewelry trade for nearly four decades, and remained the family matriarch for another three, until her death in December 1939.  

Letterhead for McTeigue, Manz & Co., 

Makers of Fine Diamond and Carved Jewelry, circa 1908
Letter, private collection 

In 1914, Sophie acquired property in the coastal Rhode Island town where daughter Martha and her husband, Arpad Rado, were members of a summer music colony. (Sophie also purchased lots in the new Sunny Heights development in Mill Valley, where her eldest son, Carl, had found work as a timber inspector for a lumber company and later for department of the interior and Stephen Mather, head of the fledgling National Park service). Martha's two sisters followed suit. Descendants still remember the large house Sophie built for herself, situated on higher ground than the rest and nicknamed "Up-Home"—evidently to remind young visitors who was The Boss. 

 Sophie's pearl earring has an eagle on it, as does
the matching brooch on her lace-lined collar
Photo private collection

"Copyright by G. Manz" 
Illustration from Manz sales brochure, circa 1910
Private Collection

"Copyright by G. Manz" 
Illustration from Manz sales brochure, circa 1910
Private Collection

Scrapbook images Gustav Manz LLC. All rights reserved. Thanks to the Boyd, Heyder, and Eastman families for sharing artifacts and family memories. And the architectural blog Daytonian in Manhattan which we often turn to for cool info about the business and manufacturing districts where Manz and other jewelers plied their trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Copyright (c) 2013

GUSTAV MANZ LLC

SCARAB FEVER

Sphinx head incorporating a piece of ancient glass, design modeled in wax and cast in gold by Gustav Manz for F. Walter Lawrence (image Town & Country, December 12, 1903)

In late spring 1904, Jewelers' Circular reviewed an exhibit organized by the Handicraft League of Cincinnati and held at the city's Woman's Club, leading with a case with almost 50 pieces belonging to "Gustav Manz, New York" that included "fine examples of the old Egyptian outline":

• "The rings in the collection were immense and the settings of gems in etruscan gold, as well as the large brooches of lapis lazuli, Cyprian glass sphynx (sic) head, in the styles of over 2,000 years ago, made a decidedly beautiful and instructive collection..." (1)

Gustav Manz necklace pendant with scarab and pyramid-shaped drop featured at the eighth Industrial Arts Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (image from The Jewelers' Circular, January 30, 1924) 

Earlier that spring Manz's historical and nouveau inspired gold-work, including a sphinx head scarf pin fashioned around a piece of ancient glass, filled the case of jeweler F. Walter Lawrence's display at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Manz's work appeared in articles Lawrence wrote for The Craftsman (2) and Town & Country (3). While neither publication credited Manz as the maker, forms submitted to the jury selecting jewelry for the St. Louis exposition reveal that virtually all of the hand-wrought work in Lawrence's traveling collection were modeled and cast by the German-born Manz, and likely had a hand in designing as well (though an emphasis on "American" design and artistry probably worked against giving credit where it was due). Lawrence's salon, along with most of the prominent jewelry retailers in Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere, would carry Manz's wares over the next four decades. 

Manz's workshop produced this ring carved with stylized Egyptian lotus and set with green tourmaline for Tiffany & Co, 1922 (Manz archive, Winterthur Museum); below: Manz gouache design for a gem-set pendant with carved urei and Egyptian figure wearing headdress (Mathews Family Collection)

                         

By 1912, after partnering with fellow manufacturing jeweler Walter P. McTeigue for a few years, Manz was established in his own studio-factory on East 28th Street, at the edge of the Flatiron District. In March of that year, he registered copyright on one of his Egyptian designs: a sculpted panel, or plaque, depicting "Two columns, carved with figure of Isis and Osiris, supporting plate above panel of pyramids, sphinx and two lions nearby, in bas-relief." 

As the jewelry industry recovered from World War I, and the 1920s roared in, orders for Manz's patriotic themed subsided and demand for his Egyptian, animal, and "oriental" novelties increased. Around this time Manz's younger daughter became her father's traveling sales representative and in-house advisor on rapidly evolving post-war fashions for women. His long record of supplying fine carved mountings for Tiffany & Company paid off when he was invited to participate in one of the Metropolitan Museum's series of industrial art exhibits organized by the museum's forward-thinking decorative arts curator Richard Bach. 

        Gustav Manz gouache rendering of an Egyptian temple 

            mounting for a scarab (Mathews Family Collection)

The Jewelers' Circular's fashion correspondent Isabelle Archer effused over "splendid examples of commercial jewelry [from] the houses of Mehrlust, Manz, and Cartier..."(4) on view at the eighth annual show. One of the most admired pieces in Manz's case was a pendant depicting a king of the Nile flanked by seated attendants; it appeared on the cover of Jewelers' Circular's issue containing the first of Archer's reviews of the 1924 show. The piece incorporated a pastiche of symbols derived from Manz's earlier studies of archaeological holdings at the Cairo Museum as well as objects from excavations of Tutankhamun's tomb.

Detail from brochure for Metropolitan Museum of Art Eighth Exhibition of Industrial Art, 1924; inset: the Met decorative art galleries, circa 1920s (brochure and gallery image accessed via Thomas Watson Library, MMA)

At the conclusion of her review, Archer pivoted from the angular sapphire, diamond and onyx jewels in the Cartier group to Manz's latest reboot of traditional motifs that were, in her words, "very distinctly the Oriental type." The array of jade, pearls, pink beryls, and other gemstones set in lattice made for "a most remarkable color scheme."(5) Cartier's geometric mounts and Manz's chinoiserie broke away from art nouveau fantasy and Edwardian garlands and toward the sleeker, stylized forms and brilliant colors embraced by the flapper generation and designers of the art deco era. 

Manz's work rarely qualified as trendy, however. To the end of his career he maintained a craftsman's allegiance to hand-wrought, custom work, generally eschewing deco's glossy, machine-age contours. Through all the change he witnessed in over his five decades in America—political, social, industrial—his favorite periods and motifs hardly changed. As Fitzgerald writes at the end of The Great Gatsby, his 1925 flapper novel: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

From Near to Far East: This gold, jade, and enamel Buddha pendant passed down to a descendant by Manz's daughter may have featured in his display case at the Metropolitan Museum Industrial Art show in 1924 (Mathews family collection)

Notes

(1) "Beautiful Art Work at the Recent Exhibition of the Handicraft League of Cincinnati." The Jewelers' Circular-Weekly, Vol. 53, No. 20 (1904): 14  
(2) Lawrence, F. Walter. "Craftsmanship versus Intrinsic Value." The Craftsman 4:3 (1903): 181-185 (illustrated)

(3) Lawrence, F. Walter. "Symbolism and Jewelry." Town & Country (December 12, 1903): 34-35

(4) Archer, Isabelle M., "When Art Meets Industry: Modern Decorative Design As Shown at The Metropolitan Museum." Archer, Isabelle M. The Jewelers' Circular, Vol. 88 (February 6, 1924): 275. Jacob Mehrlust was the third manufacturer, along with Cartier and Gustav Manz, who received special mention in Archer's review.
(5) Archer, Isabelle M., "The Present Trend in Decorative Designing, Traced Through the Industrial Exhibition Now at the Metropolitan Museum," Jewelers' Circular Vol. 88 (January 30, 1924): 53-55

We would like to thank Courtney Bowers Marhev, author of the first scholarly 

study of Gustav Manz's work, Where Credit Is Due (Smithsonian, 2008); Janet Zapata for identifying Manz's relationship with F. Walter Lawrence in an article for Magazine Antiques (April 2004); the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum for digital access to The Jewelers' Circular, Industrial Art exhibition catalogs, and help locating correspondence between 

Doris Manz Eastman and Francis Henry Taylor; and to Winterthur Museum, Garden, 

and Library as the repository for the Gustav Manz Papers.

Post updated October 21, 2019

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Copyright © 2019 | All Rights Reserved 

 Except where otherwise credited all images 
 © Gustav Manz LLC