Van Cleef & Arpels

For millennia, birds have been a much-loved jewelry motif, revisited generation after generation, each applying its own set of meanings and associations. Ancient Egyptian jewels often featured the falcon’s head of Horus, god of war and the sky. In the Christian world, the dove was employed during the Middle Ages and Renaissance to represent the Holy Spirit. By the eighteenth century, ornithological studies of species in distant lands inspired a wide range of decorative art, from textile printing to ceramic painting. Victorian jewellery, with characteristic sentimentality, depicted turtle doves as representations of love. During the same period, Boucheron created realistically rendered jeweled peacock feathers, signifiers of wealth and exoticism, to encircle the neck. (For a modern version of this design, see lot 606). 

During World War II, birds took on an especially poignant message of freedom. Cartier’s lead designer, Jeanne Toussaint, created a sweet yet subversive jewel—a brooch designed as a caged red, white and blue bird—to display in the rue de la Paix shop window. Following the Liberation, Toussaint recreated the same brooch, but now the bird was freed from its cage. 

From the 1940s through to the 1960s, birds were a favoured subject of jewellers on the Place Vendôme: Cartier, Boucheron, Marchak, Mauboussin and Sterlé all incorporated the motif with varying degrees of stylization. Van Cleef & Arpels in particular excelled with the motif and reinterpreted the bird of paradise many times with unrivalled elegance and creativity, as exemplified by lot 618.