The Cartier Museum at the Goldsmiths' Hall

In May 1988 the Cartier Museum mounted an exhibition at Goldsmiths' Hall, Foster Lane, in the City of London, running from 23 May to 10 June. The catalogue carried a foreword by Eric Nussbaum, who directed the Cartier Collection and later co-authored Reflections of Elegance: Cartier Jewels from the Lindemann Collection with Hans Nadelhoffer.

The Exhibition and its Context

Goldsmiths' Hall is the livery hall of the Goldsmiths' Company, one of the ancient City livery companies and the body responsible for hallmarking in Britain. It has a long tradition of hosting exhibitions related to the fine and applied arts in precious metals and gems. The choice of venue for a display of the Cartier Collection was appropriate: the firm's work in platinum, gold, and set stones fell squarely within the Goldsmiths' Company's remit.

The 1988 exhibition predated by nine years the large-scale retrospective Cartier 1900–1939, organised by the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Field Museum in Chicago, which travelled between 1997 and 2000 with a catalogue written by Judy Rudoe. The Goldsmiths' Hall display is best understood as an early and more compact presentation of the Cartier Collection in Britain. The following year, the Collection was shown at the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris.

The Catalogue as Reference

Nussbaum's foreword placed the Cartier Collection in its institutional context: a corporate holding of historical pieces assembled by the firm as a record of its own production and as a resource for research and display. The catalogue documents that collection at an early stage of its public presentation and serves as a period snapshot of which pieces the firm had then assembled and chosen to exhibit.

Collectors and researchers familiar with Nadelhoffer's monograph (1984) and Rudoe's 1997 catalogue sometimes encounter the 1988 Goldsmiths' Hall catalogue as a third, less widely circulated reference in the same bibliography. The catalogue is out of print and found through antiquarian booksellers.

Cited In

Referenced in the exhibition history of the Flamingo Brooch and glossary entries on Eric Nussbaum and Judy Rudoe.