Art Nouveau
JewelryWiki Editorial·2 sources·Reviewed 2026-08-04
Sinuous, organic, and deliberately indifferent to the value of its materials — the moment a jeweller could make a masterpiece out of horn and glass.
Properties
| Property | Value | Authority |
|---|---|---|
| Dates | V&A, for jewellery: 1895 – 1910, peaking around 1900 at the Paris International Exhibition. [1] | — |
| Named for | Siegfried Bing’s Paris gallery L’Art Nouveau, opened December 1895, which is credited with popularising the movement and its name. The term itself had appeared earlier, in the 1880s, in the Belgian journal L’Art Moderne. [2] | — |
| Defining traits | Caused a dramatic shift in jewellery design. Its followers created sinuous, organic pieces whose undercurrents of eroticism and death were a world away from the floral motifs of earlier generations. Sinuous lines and "whiplash" curves derived in part from botanical studies and illustrations of deep-sea organisms. [1] | — |
| Characteristic stones and metals | Jewellers such as René Lalique distanced themselves from conventional precious stones, putting greater emphasis on the subtle effects of materials such as glass, horn and enamel. [1] | — |
| Where the dating differs | The two institutions differ substantially. The V&A dates Art Nouveau JEWELLERY 1895–1910. The Met dates Art Nouveau as a whole from the 1880s until the First World War — a range roughly twice as wide at both ends. Part of the gap is scope: one is dating a jewellery style, the other a movement across all the arts. Neither is wrong, and a piece dated 1890 can be honestly called Art Nouveau under one and not the other. [2] | — |
| What to watch for | The style was not for everyone or for every occasion, and it did not have the period to itself — the V&A records that superb diamond jewellery was made in the garland style at the same time. Expect contemporaneous pieces that look nothing alike. [1] | — |
Sources
- V&A — A history of jewellery — Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A, A history of jewellery)
- The Met — Art Nouveau (Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History) — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History: Art Nouveau (Cybele Gontar, 2006))