Charles Jacqueau (1885–1968) was born in Paris and hired by Louis Cartier in 1909. From 1911 to 1935 he served as director of creation at the Paris house, a period spanning the late Garland Style through the full flowering of Art Deco and into the firm's engagement with Persian, Indian, and Far Eastern visual traditions that produced the Tutti Frutti jewels.
He was not a craftsman but a draughtsman, one of several designers who shaped the Paris output during this period; Alexandre Genaille, who later transferred to Cartier New York, was another contributor to the firm's design work in the early twentieth century. His medium was the sketchbook; he produced thousands of designs in graphite, ink, and gouache on coated paper, working out compositional ideas, colour combinations, and formal possibilities before anything was made. After his death, his daughters donated his personal notebooks and 4,200 drawings to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (Petit Palais), where they remain. An exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto in 2006–07 showed approximately 185 of the designs and remains one of the most substantial public presentations of his work.
His work spans the full arc of Cartier's two most distinct design periods. In the earlier years he worked within the Garland Style, the light, lace-like aesthetic of swags, bows, and botanical forms set in platinum. As the 1920s progressed he moved with the firm toward the geometric severity of Art Deco: bold colour contrasts, strong architectural outlines, and the influence of Cubism and ancient visual traditions. The raw material for much of this came from a wide range of sources: the objects and drawings Jacques Cartier brought back from travel (Persian tiles, Islamic manuscripts, Indian carvings, Chinese lacquerwork) as well as Egyptian and Aztec forms, and the visual language of the Ballets Russes, whose impact on Parisian decorative arts in the 1910s and 1920s was pervasive. Jacqueau's task was to translate these into wearable forms. A motif from a fourteenth-century Iranian book-binding might become a bandeau set in diamonds and rubies; a pattern from an Iznik ceramic might reappear in enamel on a vanity case. The Tutti Frutti jewels, carved Mughal gemstones mounted in fluid, multicoloured compositions, are among the most recognisable results of this process. His 4,200 drawings document it in detail.
Louis used to say that Jacqueau was his favourite designer. The two worked together closely for over two decades, and it was this partnership that gave Cartier Paris much of its creative consistency across a period of considerable stylistic change. When Jeanne Toussaint was promoted into the high jewellery department in 1933, it created friction; Jacqueau had been the central creative figure for twenty years and did not welcome the change.
Among those he trained was Jean-Jacques Cartier. After the Second World War, Jacqueau also worked for a period at Cartier London, where Jean-Jacques was by then running the branch.
He died in Paris in 1968, aged 83.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 2 (“Louis, 1898–1919”) and ch. 10 (“Cousins in Austerity, 1945–1956”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 111, 133 et al.
