When Cartier established itself at 13 rue de la Paix in 1899, Chaumet was already one of the most firmly established jewellery houses in Paris, with a client list that ran from Napoleon Bonaparte to the reigning European royal families of the late nineteenth century. The two houses operated within a few hundred metres of each other, at the western end of the Paris luxury quarter, and competed for clients drawn from the same narrow world of European royalty and inherited wealth.
Napoleon's Jeweller
Chaumet was founded in Paris in 1780 by Marie-Étienne Nitot. Napoleon I appointed Nitot as his official jeweller from 1802, and the firm went on to make Napoleon's coronation sword and jewellery for Empress Joséphine. This imperial commission gave Chaumet a historical prestige that few French luxury houses could match: the association with the Napoleonic court was a form of provenance that still attached to the house's identity well into the following century.
The house passed through several hands after Nitot's generation, eventually becoming Chaumet in 1889 under the proprietorship of Joseph Chaumet, whose name it has retained. By the time Cartier arrived on the rue de la Paix, Chaumet had been operating in some form for over a century and had a well-established reputation for tiaras, parures, and formal jewellery in the neoclassical and later Belle Époque manner.
Place Vendôme and the Competitive Geography
Chaumet moved to 12 Place Vendôme in 1907, placing it at the corner of the square where the rue de la Paix terminates. The two addresses are connected: the rue de la Paix runs directly from the Place de l'Opéra to the Place Vendôme, so Cartier's premises at number 13 and Chaumet's on the square were at either end of the same street. A client walking from one to the other was making a short journey through the heart of Paris's luxury quarter; the two houses were as much neighbours as rivals.
Boucheron had established at 26 Place Vendôme in 1893, Cartier arrived at the rue de la Paix in 1899, and Chaumet moved to the square corner in 1907. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the western end of the first arrondissement had become the concentrated geography of Parisian fine jewellery, with these three houses all within a few minutes' walk of one another.
Tiaras and Shared Clientele
Chaumet is particularly associated with tiaras. It has been estimated that the firm produced over 2,000 tiaras across its history, a figure that, if accurate, would make it the single most prolific tiara-maker in France. The garland style that defined luxury jewellery of the Belle Époque suited tiara production well: the openwork scrolls, festoons, and diamond-set foliate motifs of the period translated naturally into the large-scale formal structures that royal and aristocratic clients required for court dress.
Both Chaumet and Cartier served the British royal family, the Russian imperial court, and the wider European and South American aristocracy in the pre-war period. The aesthetic associated with Chaumet tends toward a softer and more romantic interpretation of the garland idiom than the cooler, more architectural approach that characterised Cartier's work under Louis Cartier, though both were working within broadly the same design vocabulary. Teasing apart the precise character of each house's output in this period requires looking at documented pieces rather than at generalisations.
The firm went bankrupt in 1987 and has changed ownership several times since, but it continues to operate from Place Vendôme.
Sources
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 17, 88 et al.
- Chaumet, Wikipedia
- Place Vendôme, Wikipedia
