Designs for seven bracelets with natural motifs
Not on view
Drawing with designs for seven bracelets, part of an album of drawings in pen and ink of designs for jewelry in the style of the French School of the 19th century, designed for the French jewelry house Mellerio-Borgnis. The first bracelet is made up of a gold bangle and two vertical scrolls of gold, framed by thin strips of enamel, the outer parts forming C-curves around oval pearls, and separated by a slightly diagonal strip of oval pearls. The second bracelet is made up of a gold bangle with a green, scalloping frame in the center, holding a quatrefoil ot oval pearls, and flanked to the sides by two smaller frames of similar shape, each containing three oval pearls; the green color would have most likely been achieved with enamel in the manufactured jewel. The third design consists of two thin interlacing strips of gold, their union flanked above and below by small, round pearls, and flanked to the sides by semi-abstract gold motifs, each with a small, round pearl in the center; this could have been used to adorn the center of a bangle, or repeated indefinitely to create a bracelet. The fourth design consists of a round, yellow gold bangle that scrolls in the front to create a type of knot. The fifth design is made up of two parallel strips of gold, held together by a series of pieces of gold interlacing around them forming 8-shapes. The fifth design is made up of a thick, gold bangle, with a rectangular opening in the center, framed with blue, containing two silver rings and an 8-shaped strip of sliver that scrolls vertically around the bangle, all of them held together by horizontal strips of gold and blue, and with a semi-abstract trefoil on the left, also in gold and blue, with a round pearl in the center. The last bracelet is made up of a thick, gold bangle, also with a rectangular opening in the center, with two 8-shaped interlacing pieces of gold on the sides, and with an S-curved blue ribbon with a strip of square-cut diamonds in the center, intersected by a horizontal, undulating garland of stylized silver leaves and oval pearls. The blue in the last two designs would have been achieved using enamel or inserts of turquoise, lapislazuli, or other (semi-)precious stones in the finalized jewels.
