Eugène Grasset, Georges Callot, Charles Desrosiers, Pierre-George Deraisme, and Charles Jacqueau are among the least-known names in the world of fine jewelry. Yet these men, over a 100-year period that began in the mid–19th century, designed some of the most beautiful and important jewelry produced in the best Paris maisons—think Cartier, Boucheron, Vever. Their relative anonymity derives from the open secret essential to the identity and heritage of these greats: only the house name is stamped on jewelry, not that of the designer. This is hardly unique to France, though as the historical locus of jewelry since the reign of Louis XIV, the tradition of the anonymous designer began here.
Happily, that will change with the exhibition that just opened at the Petit Palais, in Paris, “Jewelry Designs: Secrets of the Creation.” Indeed, secrets is the operative word, applied not only to these gifted designers but to the Petit Palais, whose collection of some 5,600 jewelry sketches and gouache renderings is barely known, even to specialists. (A significant 1998 donation from the daughters of the Cartier designer Charles Jacqueau forms the core of the collection.)
