Tall, slightly balding, and dressed in bespoke suits, the visionary jeweler David Webb was a man who gave information selectively to the press, preferring to keep his own counsel. Even the facts he shared about his childhood were scant: we know he was born in 1925 in Asheville, North Carolina, worked at his uncle’s jewelry shop, and after high school briefly served in the army. It’s not that he was shy—far from it, by some accounts, especially during beer-fueled Friday-night poker games with the men in his workshop. It’s that he was focused on what he wanted to express. Underneath a certain Southern brio, he was a one-man marketing team, tossing bon mots with cunning, and charming magazine editors in the process. When he died, at the relatively young age of 50 in December 1975, mysteries lingered. But this much was rock-crystal clear: David Webb believed that jewelry was art. “The things I make have museum quality,” he said.
What does this mean? That a handmade piece of jewelry—whether it is a necklace or a pair of earrings—is communicating on many levels and can stand up to analysis. It means that Webb designed his pieces with intent and instinct, and that subtext, history, and passion live within them. In the course of writing two books on this American jeweler, I’ve been sleuth and stalker, sometimes just old-fashioned gumshoe girl detective, as I try to explain the cultural reverberations in his work and identify the underlying imagery and influences. Art, architecture, dance, fashion, and more, it’s all there. It’s what makes David Webb David Webb.
For my new book, The Art of David Webb, I began by culling his personal reference library, leafing through books on Chinese art, and heraldic orders, and even children’s books about animals. I went back to the company’s newspaper and magazine archives and pored over hundreds upon hundreds of Webb’s drawings. What I found—that click of recognition—astonished me.
For instance, one news account mentioned Webb’s trips to the Greek and Roman galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so off I went. There I found a Greek Cypriot double-headed lion’s-head bracelet, 450–400 B.C., which some 2,400 years later was reborn in Webb’s Greek Lion Bangles (1965).
A culmination of hints and luck led to the discovery of my holy grail, also at the Met—a gold Scythian pommel, sixth century B.C. Intrigued by a brief mention of Webb attending an exhibition of Scythian art in 1959, I went searching for the catalogue, where I came upon a photo of the pommel and realized it was a twin to David Webb’s Coiled Dragon Brooch, designed in 1972. Side by side, both beasts were in a fetal shape, their webbed and taloned paws similarly curled. But with a jeweler’s difference: the Webb dragon is in diamonds and clutches a carved emerald.
Archaeological digging was not always necessary, however, as Webb was also a man of his time. The organic curves of the Guggenheim Museum, built in 1959, resonate with a curved and banded gold cuff from 1970. And dialogue between David Webb and cutting-edge fashion designers began when the company was founded, in 1948. Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic color-block sheath of 1965 and the Piet Mondrian grids he drew from both echo in the jeweler’s similar boogie-woogie of a bracelet, designed in 1967. A riff on Op art bounces between a Geoffrey Beene black-and-white bolero and the jeweler’s Cosmos Earrings, radiant with diamonds and black enamel.
And then there’s the Great Wave Earrings, with curls of white enamel, carved blue sapphires, and diamonds. It’s almost impossible not to see Hokusai’s The Great Wave, circa 1830–32. That inspiration was easy to figure out. The current owner of David Webb told me. Just call me Sherlock.
Ruth Peltason is a New York–based editor, writer, and jewelry authority. Her new book, The Art of David Webb,is out now from Rizzoli
