The New York branch was built by Pierre Cartier, the middle of the three brothers, who moved to New York around 1909 and spent the following decades cultivating the American market with particular skill. The operation eventually settled at 653 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of 52nd Street, in premises acquired in 1917 through one of the most celebrated transactions in the firm's history: Pierre traded a double-strand natural pearl necklace, valued at around one million dollars, for the Morton Plant mansion at that address; Plant's wife Maisie had wanted the necklace, and the building was the price. Cartier gained the building; Plant's wife gained the necklace. The Fifth Avenue address remained Cartier's New York home from that point forward.
The American market Pierre was navigating had different characteristics from either Paris or London. Pierre assembled a team that included the designer Alexandre Genaille, who had worked at Cartier Paris before transferring to the New York operation. The clients of the Gilded Age and its aftermath (the industrialists, financiers, and socialites who made up the core of the New York clientele) had often made their fortunes rather than inherited them, and their appetite for large, impressive, and demonstrably valuable objects shaped the branch's character. The pieces commissioned in New York tended toward bolder statements than their Parisian or London equivalents, and the transactions that defined the branch's reputation were often on a correspondingly large scale.
The most celebrated of these was Pierre's 1911 sale of the Hope Diamond (the 45.52-carat blue diamond with a long and complicated history) to the American socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean for $180,000. The stone passed through several subsequent owners and is now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
Pierre was the longest-lived of the three brothers. He retired to Geneva in 1947 and died in 1964. His daughter Marion subsequently managed the Paris operations with her husband Pierre Claudel.
The formal legal entity for the New York operation was Cartier Inc (Incorporated).
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 121, 331 et al.
