Victorian Jewelry Design

H. Regnery Co, 1973-01-01. Hardcover. Acceptable/Good. Henry Regnery Company, Chicago [Published Date: 1972]. Hardcover, 285. No other printings listed. Acceptable+ in good dust jacket. Purple cloth covered boards with gold lettering on spine. Light scuffing and fading to edges of covers. Binding tight. Moderate age spotting to edges of textblock with heavier age spotting to title page and first and last few pages. Otherwise pages are aged but unmarked with occasional moderate age spotting throughout. Dust jacket has several small nicks and tears and light creasing to edges. light overall scuffing to jacket as well and fading to spine. NOT price clipped. Now in an archival-quality (removable) Brodart Cover. NOT Ex-Library. NO remainder marks. [From front jacket flap] Jewelry design has rarely been so inventive as during the second half of the nineteenth century. Changes in fashion were closely followed, changes which increased in frequency with improved communications and international exhibitions, so that fashions which stemmed from Pans or Rome would soon be adopted in England - and America. While mechanical manufacture meant that the growing demand for fashionable jewelry could be met, contemporaries were alert to the dangers of mass production. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was itself directed to raise the standard of design in manufacture, and stern criticisms were leveled against the jewelry produced throughout the period, yet there survives today a wide selection of well designed nineteenth-century jewelry of fine workmanship for the collector and the bargain- hunter to browse over.Identifying the varied styles and fashions which influenced the craftsmen and manufacturers, such as the enthusiasm for neogothic, archaeological motifs, adaptations of Japanese and Indian art, and botanical novelties, Victorian Jewelry Design is an absorbing guide to the probable origin of many of these nineteenth-century pieces providing the kind of knowledge that enabled the author to identify a gold bracelet in an Oxfam shop as being made by Carlo Doria for Robert Phillips. It traces the influences underlying the changes of fashion, and shows how it was frequently artists—sometimes producing their own hand-made pieces—such as William Burges, Charles Ricketts, the Pre- Raphaelites and the leaders of Art Nouveau who introduced fresh inspiration, rather than the trade craftsmen. With over 150 [black and white] illustrations.