Sir Ernest Cassel (1852–1921) was a German-born British financier who became one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Edwardian England. He was a close personal friend of King Edward VII (the two had known each other since the Prince of Wales years) and was among the most significant clients of both Cartier and Fabergé in the early years of the twentieth century. His private wealth and his proximity to power placed him at the centre of Edwardian political and social life.
The Wisteria Brooches
At the end of 1903, Cassel commissioned a pair of diamond and platinum brooches from Louis Cartier as a gift for his sister Bobby. The pieces, inspired by illustrations of wisteria from the Japanese art compendium Le Japon Artistique, were designed with a mechanical ingenuity characteristic of Louis Cartier's approach at this period: the two brooches could be connected using a purpose-made miniature spanner to form a stomacher, a necklace, a corsage ornament, or a tiara. Four configurations from a single commission, with the conversion tool supplied alongside the jewels.
The pieces were historically catalogued as "fern-spray brooches" until the V&A's major Cartier exhibition in 2025, where they were displayed alongside the wisteria illustration that had inspired them and given their current name. They are among the earliest documented examples of Cartier's practice of building multiple configurations into a single jewel, a technique that would recur across the Garland and Art Deco periods.
Cartier and Fabergé
Cassel collected from both houses. His Fabergé pieces included a diamond-set roulette wheel; his Cartier commissions centred on the fern brooches and related pieces from the early 1900s. The overlap was not unusual at this level of collecting; the wealthiest Edwardian clients tended to buy from both Paris and St Petersburg, treating the two houses as complementary rather than competing sources.
His association with Cartier belongs to Louis's early years at the firm, a period when the Garland Style was still being defined and the convertible jewel was one of the tools Louis used to demonstrate what the house could do. The wisteria brooches are discussed in detail at The Cartier Wisteria Brooches.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 4 (“Jacques, 1906–1919”)
- Wikipedia: Sir Ernest Cassel
