In a lecture hosted at the Hillwood estate in Washington DC, Francesca Cartier Brickell traced the Cartier family's deep involvement with natural pearls: from the height of the pearl trade in the early twentieth century to its collapse, and the pieces that survive as evidence of what was lost.
The full webinar is available to watch at The Cartiers and their Pearls.
Why pearls mattered to the Cartiers personally
Francesca opened by describing how the subject arrived for her through family photographs. Her great-great-grandmother, along with almost every woman in the family photographs from that era, was wearing pearls. "It struck me," she noted, "how central pearls were to the world these people lived in."
Before the cultured pearl industry was established in the early twentieth century, natural pearls were among the most valuable objects in existence. Their value lay entirely in scarcity and chance: a natural pearl required an oyster to form a protective layer around an irritant over several years, with no intervention possible. Two matching pearls of similar size, colour, and lustre were extraordinarily rare. A perfectly matched double strand was rarer still.
The Pearl Age
The rediscovery of pearl-rich waters in the Caribbean, financed by Spain during its expansion into the Americas in the sixteenth century, triggered what historians call the Pearl Age. Enormous quantities of pearls entered Europe from the new world. The Patagonian Pearl was among the most celebrated finds of this period, its journey through various hands illustrating how these objects moved between cultures, collections, and owners over centuries.
By the late nineteenth century, the primary sources were the Persian Gulf, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and the coasts of Venezuela. Jacques Cartier made several trips to Bahrain and India specifically to buy pearls at source, developing direct relationships with the trading families who controlled supply. His letters from these journeys, preserved in the family archive, describe the process of selection and the prices involved.
Cartier as broker and jeweller
The Cartiers operated in the pearl trade at several levels simultaneously. They bought unstrung pearls from dealers and pearl divers, they restrung and remounted pieces acquired from estate sales, and they sold complete necklaces to clients as finished jewellery. Madame Rico, a specialist pearl stringer who worked with Cartier Paris, was responsible for assembling the firm's most important necklaces, a job requiring years of experience to match stones by colour, size, and lustre across a complete strand.
Pierre Cartier built Cartier New York's early reputation substantially on pearls. The most famous transaction in this history involved Morton Plant, whose double-stranded pearl necklace was considered one of the finest in the world. Plant owned a townhouse on Fifth Avenue at what is now 653 Fifth Avenue, a prime location. Pierre saw an opportunity: he proposed a trade. The necklace, valued at one million dollars, for the townhouse. The exchange was made in 1917, and Cartier New York moved into what became its permanent address.
The end of the natural pearl market
The development of cultured pearl technology in Japan changed the economics of the pearl market irreversibly. By the 1930s, cultured pearls were entering the market in quantity, indistinguishable to the eye from natural pearls. The value of natural pearl necklaces collapsed. Pieces that had sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars were remounted, restruck, or broken up. Many of the great necklaces of the Belle Epoque and Edwardian period were dispersed in this period.
The Cartiers adapted, as they had through previous upheavals, but the scale of their pearl operation in the 1900s and 1910s was never replicated. What survives is partly in the pieces themselves, partly in the records Jacques left of his travels, and partly in the auction history of necklaces that passed through the firm's hands.
The Cartiers and their Pearls was recorded at Hillwood estate, Museum and Gardens, Washington DC, as part of a series linked to the exhibition Fragile Beauty: Art of the Ocean.
Watch the full webinar: The Cartiers and their Pearls
