MOONSTRUCK OVER MOONSTONE: IZABEL COLES & BETH SUTHERLAND

Early in January 1916, a young jewelry designer named Izabel (formerly Isabelle) M. Coles called at Gustav Manz's studio near Madison Square Park and purchased a baroque pearl stickpin portraying Shylock—one of a series of whimsical miniature caricatures Manz was producing for his wholesale accounts. 

             

From top: Izabel M. Coles, circa 1940s; production note in Gustav Manz costbook: "Item 312: B[aroque] Pearl Shylock head. Sold, Isabelle M. Coles 1/6/16"; Gustav Manz sketch and photo of carved bust set with baroque pearl "turban" (Headshot of Coles via Antiques Road Show; stickpin drawing, Gustav Manz archive at Winterthur Museum; photo of Manz figural pin, private collection)

The Renaissance trompe l'oeil trick of using Baroque pearls to stand in for figural details was a Manz specialty. Other motifs from this line were a Turk, a Moor, a woman in milkmaid's cap (a Tricoteuse?), a medieval German Warrior, an Arab, a Native American Indian, a Roman Gladiator, and an American Eagle covering its nest egg. (The United States had not yet joined the Allies in declaring war against the Kaiser, and Manz may have been hedging his bets as a businessman by offering an array of nationalistic symbols.) 

Apart from that lone transaction recorded in his costbooks, Manz's acquaintance with his customer is as mysterious as Coles herself. City directories and other sources reveal that after receiving a diploma from Cooper Union in 1912, Coles worked at Persian Rug Manufacturing Co., then for several years as assistant to another Manz client: Elinor Evans Klapp (Mrs. William H. Klapp), a designer of jewelry and decorative objects who occupied one of the artist studios at 80 West 40th Street, a fashionable Beaux Arts building overlooking Bryant Park designed by Lamb & Rich. 

Gouache cartoon for a platinum and diamond pendant with carved moonstone from Mrs. William H. Klapp's design scrapbook; the drawing may relate to a pendant entitled "Love on a Snail" exhibited by Mrs. Klapp at Chicago Art Institute in 1914  
(Bronson Family Collection)

By the time Coles came under her wing, Mrs. Klapp had been providing custom mountings for private clients for well over a decade, first in Chicago and then in New York, where she'd moved with her husband (a dry goods merchant) after his retirement. She exhibited her jewelry, all fabricated by hired hands, at gallery shows and international expos. During Coles' tenure, Mrs. Klapp received the Arthur Heun Prize for best crafts-work of original design at the Chicago Art Institute's 13th Annual Exhibition of Industrial Art (an honor previously won by fellow-Society of Arts and Crafts members Josephine Hartwell Shaw and Margaret Rogers). Klapp lent pieces to Newark Museum's inaugural jewelry exhibition, in 1914, featuring the carved gems she favored: moonstone, amethyst, and crystallite. 

Entry in Gustav Manz business ledger for a gothic revival style ring set with lapis intaglio purchased from Mrs. William H. Klapp and sold to Combes & Van Roden in 1917 
(Gustav Manz archive, Winterthur Museum Library) 

Coles' job with Mrs. Klapp ended with her employer's death in August 1915; she returned to decorating for a few months, designing a pair of Persian panels for a New York house, before joining Louis Tiffany's art jewelry department under Meta Overbeck in 1917 (see Janet Zapata, The Jewelry and Enamels of Louis Comfort Tiffany, 1993; and Clare Phillips, Bejewelled by Tiffany, 2006).

Coles remained close to her mother, Hester Moulton Coles—who had separated from Isabelle's father, Robert MacQuoid, shortly after their daughter's birth and kept her family name. In 1912, Hester—who listed her occupation as dressmaker—married a prosperous rope manufacturer, Isaac Leroy Allen (1845-1925). When he died, Hester moved in with Izabel at 15 West 11th Street. Following her mother's death, in December 1929, Coles rented a flat in an apartment building on West 55th Street. By this time Coles (who rechristened herself Izabel after entering Cooper Union) had left Tiffany's employ and established her own studio at 19 East 57th Street. In 1931, she received this glowing notice in Harper's Bazaar: 

"Here's a suggestion: Design your Personality into your Jewellery. And an idea that no woman would not be intrigued with, particularly when such a charming artist and craftswoman as Miss Izabel M. Coles interprets your personality into a resplendent necklace of varicoloured sapphires, set in a medieval design..." 

Designs for a parure with faceted stones 
designed by Izabel M. Coles  

(Screen shot from WGBH Antiques Roadshow)

The New Yorker placed Coles at the top of its directory of "Little Jewelers" in its December 3, 1932 issue. Though the Depression hit manufacturing jewelers hard, Izabel may have come into her own money after her mother died, and had an extensive network of family and social connections to fall back on. One of them was Beth Benton Sutherland, a gem carver whose miniatures carved on moonstone became coveted by the portrait-seeking classes. 

Beth Sutherland at her bench

(The New York Evening Post, January 11, 1928)

A decade younger than Coles, Sutherland was newly graduated from Skidmore College in summer 1921 when she entered the workshop of Ottavio Negri, a master gem engraver. Born in Rome, Negri had trained with the best carvers in Italy (including the workshop where Augustus St. Gaudens apprenticed) and later served as secretary of a society of gem collectors and lapidaries of which J. P. Morgan was president. Negri's business card featured an embossed silhouette of Dante Alighieri and a list of honors including medals at the Paris Exposition (1879), London Crystal Palace (1888) and Chicago World's Fair (1889). As Sutherland later recounted, she had to wage a campaign to persuade Negri to let her work as an unpaid apprentice in his shop. Eventually his "office girl" left to get married, and she took her job. She likely met Coles through Negri, as he'd engraved gems for Coles' former employer, Mrs. Klapp, and was one of the early residents at the Bryant Park Studio Building.

Detail from Ottavio Negri business card 

(Collection of Negri's great-grandson)

One of Sutherland's most publicized commissions was a necklace of platinum links strung with twelve moonstone medallions, each portraying the face of one of Mrs. John J. Raskob's children. (In August 1929, Raskob's husband—one of America's wealthiest men—advised Ladies Home Journal readers that anyone could become rich simply by investing fifteen dollars a month in common stocks over a period of years; two months after the article, the market crashed.) Sutherland cut portraits on other gems, but was particularly drawn to moonstone for its lustre and because traditional carvers did not make much use of it so her work would stand out from the antique. 

While her forte was capturing the countenances of children, she also cut portraits of adults—including Edward S. Harkness, whose likeness was carved on a large moonstone as a gift to his wife and later made its way into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The design for the mounting was Coles's, executed by New York goldsmith Vincent Provenzano. The moonstone used in the piece, provided by Tiffany gem expert George Kunz, was said to have been "a rare one" (see Clare Phillips' Bejewelled by Tiffany).

Intaglio portrait of Edward S. Harkness, c.1929. Carved on moonstone by Beth Benton Sutherland, with gold, diamond, and emerald mounting designed by Izabel M. Coles and executed by goldsmith Vincent Provenzano

(Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection)

In August 1938, the Harkness gem was the centerpiece of a joint exhibit of Sutherland and Coles' work at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Framed by emeralds and yellow and brown diamonds in a filigree scroll pattern, with emeralds incorporated in a chain, so that it could be worn close to Mrs. Harkness' heart. (Though perhaps not too far from home: one newspaper noted that the value of several pieces in the exhibit was so great their owners' names were withheld "out of concern for personal safety.")   

                     

Catalog for "Gem Portraits" exhibit, 1938 
(Berkshire Museum Archives) 

Coles designed all the mountings for Sutherland's miniatures, with Manhattan bench jewelers Vincent Provenzano and Herman Koechendoerfer fabricating. Arnold Belais—whose family firm patented a non-tarnishable white-gold substitute for platinum—created one of Coles' individual pieces. 

Sutherland argued for a new age of craftsmanship in a piece for Magazine Antiques ("Antiques for the Future") that included examples of her intaglio work. The incised portraits in this bracelet were connected by rivets so the stones could be detached and set in four separate rings
(Image from Magazine Antiques, January 1947)

Sutherland continued to take commissions while raising a family with her artist husband, Charles Molseley Sutherland. Fearing that practitioners of the glyptic art might vanish within a generation, she funneled her practical and historical knowledge into a book, The Romance of Seals and Engraved Gems (1965), then dedicated the work to Negri. 

Coles, by contrast, seems to have followed fashion trends in materials and style, making the leap from gothic arabesques for Mrs. Klapp and Tiffany, to her own gem-carved floral jewelry designs in the 1930s, to adornments composed of enameled safety pins for a group show of "Modern Handmade Jewelry" (1946-1947) at the Museum of Modern Art. A press release in MoMA's archive referred to "new work by Izabel M. Coles of New York City, formerly of Tiffany's... suggestive of ancient Egyptian adornments..." Exhibitors included Alexander Calder and Anni Albers, who also emphasized everyday material and "found objects" (a brooch by another craftsman, Paris-born jeweler and engraver Marc Koven, of the firm Koven Frères, pushed the envelope with pieces incorporating fused earth taken from the atomic testing grounds in Alamogordo, New Mexico).  

 Izabel M. Coles jewelry and drawings awaiting appraisal by one of Antiques Roadshow's expert in August 2009 
(Screen shot, WGBH)

Details about Coles' life, particularly post-1940s, are scant. In her 60s, she married Cornelius F. Shaw, a widowed contractor with three grown children, and predeceased him in 1964. In the 50s, she donated six of her early interior design elevations to the Cooper Hewitt (read more at Dining Rooms to Diamonds). A glimpse of Coles' jewelry archive surfaced in summer of 2009, when a relative in San Diego presented a scrapbook and some of Coles' jewelry to Antiques Roadshow for appraisal, including a couple of the "safety pin" assemblages from the MoMA show. 

As for Gustav Manz's miniature of Shylock, one can only speculate whether Coles purchased it for a gift—her stepbrother was a musical theater actor—or if it remained in her possession through two wars, the Great Depression, and the dawning of "atomic" jewelry. Its manufacture coincided with a revival of The Merchant of Venice at The New Amsterdam Theater in New York, two years after its London run. We imagine Cole having the reverse side engraved with Portia's advice to the Prince of Morocco (which he ignores, thus losing her hand): 'All that glisters is not gold...'

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Shylock, 

in 1914 London production of The Merchant of Venice, over inscription "Sufferance is the hedge of all our tribe" 

(c) Victoria & Albert Museum

Our thanks to the descendants of Elinor Evans Klapp and Ottavio Negri for opening family scrapbooks; to Kay Olson Freeman for sharing insight and research on the artists; to Newark Museum and librarian Jeannine Solensky at Winterthur Museum for archival assistance, and to K. John Lor, past curator at Berkshire Museum, for permission to post the exhibition brochure and press clipping about Sutherland's and Coles' "Gem Portraits." 

Copyright © 2014 by Laura Mathews  
All Rights Reserved 

 GUSTAV MANZ LLC

Updated 12/15/2019

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"

Extracts from Gustav Manz ledgers courtesy of
Winterthur Museum; except as noted, other images and text 
Copyright © 2012 | Gustav Manz LLC 

All Rights Reserved 
Text updated 9/15/2015

LITTLE BIT OF BAD Louis C. Tiffany, peacock suppers and "a preacher's daughter who never orders water..."

Once upon a time, peacocks were all the rage (hats, jewelry, sheet music, men). We fancy Gustav Manz's platinum peacock pendant, below, adorning one of the young lovelies tasked with entertaining the 150 'Men of Genius' during the famous peacock feast hosted by Louis Comfort Tiffany at his Laurelton Hall estate on May 15, 1914. At the feast, diners were greeted by a young woman dressed as Juno, carrying a live bird. 

Platinum Peacock Pendant set with 45 precious stones

 Gustav Manz for Tiffany & Co

Image (c) Gustav Manz LLC

        Peacock Headdress (1913), a gift of Julia Tiffany Weld

 Museum of the City of New York

Gustav Manz design drawing for a peacock pendant 

1890s-1900s 

Private Collection

The peahen was in vogue, as ornament and as repast, all through the Edwardian Age. A few months before Tiffany's bash, Lady Augusta Gregory (co-founder of the Abbey Theater in Dublin) had organized a more intimate peacock roast in honor Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (the bird was culled from Blunt's personal flock). In attendance were the young Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, and several other poets, who presented Blunt with manuscripts of their latest verses ensconced in a marble coffer bearing the figure of a reclining nude woman by modernist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. 

Really, these poets knew how to orchestrate a memorable party (and made certain the press wrote up the occasion for posterity). 

But we digress from today's special entertainment: soprano Gladys Rice on an original Edison disc recording belting out a priceless little tune composed in 1916 by two Tin Pan Alley men of genius Fred Fischer and Grant Clarke. Click on "There's A Little Bit of Bad in Every Good Little Girl". 

You can follow the words here:

               
Sheet Music courtesy Johns Hopkins University Digital Library (jscholarship.library.jhu.edu)

Gladys Rice in an undated photo

_________________________________________

Copyright © Laura Mathews, 2014 
All Rights Reserved 

 GUSTAV MANZ LLC

__________________________________________

RAGTIME: A JEWELER'S TIN PAN ALLEY CAT

"Peg O'My Heart" featured in The Ziegfeld Follies 
 (Image from NYPL Digital Gallery)

Penciled into Gustav's stockbook is a name matching that of the originator of such toe-tapping tunes as "Chicago, That Toddlin' Town..." (1922), torchy songs like "I'd Rather Be Blue" and "My Man" (1928, with Billy Rose), and kitsch like "Peg O'My Heart" (1913)—which probably rivaled Lawrence Welk in its symphonic Aeolian player organ song-roll form. 

Fred Fischer, the composer of these and other songbook standards, was born in 1875 to American parents based in Cologne, Germany. His father, Max Fischer, was a traveling glove salesman, while his mother, Theodora von Breitenbach, was a writer and journalist involved with the Baron Von Hirsch Institute. Fred ran away from home at 13 and joined the Prussian Navy, served in the French Foreign legion, and worked as a traveling salesman in India and the U.S., before emigrating to America in the early 1900s. He started his songwriting career while working for a Chicago music publisher, went on to became a Tin Pan Alley fixture, then—when radio cut into demand for sheet music—got his second wind in Hollywood writing for silent films and Ziegfeld-esque musical reviews (one of them, "A Tableau of Jewels," featured an exotic dancer in pasties emerging from her art-deco shell...) before moving back to New York. 

Fred Fischer aspired to write serious music but found greater success composing music for Vaudeville stars such as Blossom Seeley known as the Queen of Syncopation

On the 30th of December 1915, Fischer was on the cusp of 40; his wife had just given birth to their first child, Doris. Professionally he'd had a strong year, with a new hit entitled "Siam." Prone to bouts of melancholy, Fischer (who would eventually drop the "c" in his name, probably to make it seem less Germanic) may have needed cheering up before New Year's Eve revels and stopped by Gustav Manz's workshop (then located a few blocks east of Tin Pan Alley, at 37 E 28th Street) where he purchased one of Manz's signature rings—a gold panther crouched over a topaz in a leafy setting. 

Gustav Manz ledger records a Panther and Topaz ring 
sold to Fred Fischer (Winterthur Museum archive);

below, Manz's model for a panther and snake ring, circa 1910-20 (private collection; photo by Ellen Martin for Gustav Manz LLC

Following her dad's path, Doris Fischer grew up to become a popular radio singer-songwriter—her first hit was "Tutti Frutti"; "You Always Hurt the One You Love" became a million-seller for the crooning Mills brothers. After marrying she retired from showbiz and took up a second career as an interior designer, helping First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy locate period pieces for her White House makeover. Doris's brothers, Dan and Marvin, who took over their father's music publishing business, wrote such jazzy standards as "Good Morning Heartache" (Dan), and "When Sunny Gets Blue" (Marvin).

According to the New York Times, Fred Fischer wrote or published a thousand songs. Paramount produced a musical "Oh, You Beautiful Doll" based on his life story (though the title song was written by Irving Berlin)

As for Fred, Billboard's March 1949 Honor Roll of Popular Songwriters noted that he never lost his thick German accent, was a rabid baseball fan and rooter of the Yankees, and had a standing offer of $50 for anyone who could make him laugh. Incredibly prolific, he even wrote his own swan song (plagued by ill health, he committed suicide in January 1942). The chorus ran: "In my ranch 'way up in heaven, with the old gang around/Just the promised land for an old cowhand in my happy huntin' ground..." (More details on this lyrical American family here and here.)

Doris Fisher (photo: San Francisco Jazz Organization

 "There's a Little Bit of Bad in Every Good Little Girl" 

by Grant Clarke and Fred Fischer

recorded by Billy Murray in Camden, NJ on September 5, 1916

http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/5140/

Copyright © 2014 
All Rights Reserved 

 GUSTAV MANZ LLC

Postscript March 2021: 

Further research turned up a possible alternative identity for the circa 1915 purchaser of Manz's panther and topaz ring: A diamond setter named Fred Fischer worked for the Newark firm of Sloan & Co. and would likely have been familiar with Manz's work for Tiffany & Co and other jewelry retailers of that era. 

—The Editors