Arts & Craft Jewellery

Arts and Crafts Jewellery
The new design philosophy of Arts and Crafts that sprang up after 1870 was a reaction to mass produced goods and inferior machine made products. It was a reaction to the shoddy interior and ornamental products of the industrial revolution. Leaders of the movement in England included William Morris and John Ruskin and they promoted simple Arts and Crafts of designs based on floral, primitive or Celtic forms worked as wallpapers, furniture and jewellery.
The polished stones used in Arts and Crafts jewellery gave a medieval, simpler, gentler, tooled hand made look and feel to items. People inspired by the movement to produce work of a more individual nature included Liberty of London and Renee Mackintosh of Glasgow. By 1900, Arts and Crafts as a movement declined, so Art Nouveau, a more ostentatious version started in France took root.
Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau jewellery follows curving sinuous organic lines of romantic and imaginary dreaminess, with long limbed ethereal beauties sometimes turning into winged bird and flower forms. The movement began in Paris and its influence went throughout the Western world.
The Frenchman René Lalique was the master goldsmith of the era of Art Nouveau producing exquisite one off pieces. As an art movement today, the style is still admired and still copied.
Magnificent floral and botanical forms often worked in enamel were inexpensive and became so popular once mass-produced, that the Art Nouveau style declined.