Gilded Age Jewelry: The Making of Modern Luxury

A celebration of the sumptuous diamonds, pearls, and gold of jewelry’s design renaissance in America and Europe during the Gilded Age.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, a new world order was written in diamonds, pearls, and gold. American fortunes, vast, liquid, and impatient, crossed the Atlantic in search of titles, culture, and craftsmanship. What they found on Paris’s Place Vendôme and London’s Bond Street changed jewelry forever.

Accompanying an opulent, full-scale exhibition at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, FL, this magnificent volume features jewels by Boucheron, Cartier, Tiffany & Co., Chaumet, Mellerio, and traces jewelry's transformation across six themes:

• The Dollar Princesses who funded the evolution of Place Vendôme
• The Pearl Wars that convulsed the luxury market
• The revolutionary lightness of the Garland Style
• The integration of jewelry and interior design
• The idealized natural world
• The theater of social performance for which these objects were made