When Cartier moved to number 13 on rue de la Paix in 1899, the most established jewellery house on the same street was not Boucheron at the corner of Place Vendôme but Mellerio, at number 9, barely one building away. Mellerio had been on that street since 1815: eighty-four years before Cartier's arrival. The house now known as Mellerio dits Meller traces its origins to a family of traders from the Valle Vigezzo, a valley in Piedmont in what is now northern Italy. The company's official founding date of 1613 refers to a royal trading privilege granted by Marie de Médicis to inhabitants of the valley, giving them the right to sell goods freely across France outside the guild system. This was a legal charter for a community of pedlars and small merchants, not a jewellery workshop founding. The earliest documented evidence of the family operating as jewellers is an account book from 1776, and the first identifiable Parisian maison dates to 1796, when François Mellerio opened on the rue Vivienne in the commercial vacuum left by the Revolution's destruction of the guild-based trade.
The move to what became the family's defining address came in 1815. François Mellerio and his brother Jean-Jacques relocated to rue de la Paix, where the 1835 Almanach des 25000 adresses records them as "Mellerio dit Meller père et fils, bijoutiers, brevetés de SM la reine." By the time Cartier moved to 13 rue de la Paix in 1899, Mellerio had been on the same short street for over eighty years. With Mellerio at what is now number 9 and Cartier at number 13, only one building stood between them on a street barely 230 metres long.
Royal patronage
The house accumulated royal warrants across multiple European courts throughout the nineteenth century. Empress Joséphine was among the earliest documented clients of the Parisian maison; under the Second Empire, Empress Eugénie commissioned the peacock feather brooch now held at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris. The Spanish connection was formalised through Queen Isabella II, whose patronage led to the opening of a Madrid branch in 1850, and whose daughter received a shell-form tiara made by Mellerio for the 1867 Paris Exhibition, still in the Spanish royal collection. In 1889 the house produced a ruby parure (tiara, necklace, bracelet, brooch, stomacher, earrings, and fan) for Queen Emma of the Netherlands, designed by Oscar Massin and still held in the Dutch royal collection.
Design and aesthetic
The association with Oscar Massin is central to understanding where Mellerio sat aesthetically in the Belle Époque. Massin (1829–1913) was the leading exponent of the naturalistic school that used illusion settings and lace-like diamond work to render flowers, leaves, and organic forms with unprecedented lightness. He worked for Mellerio among other houses, and the Dutch ruby parure is among the most documented examples of his craft in a Mellerio commission. The specialist publication L'Estampille L'Objet d'art treated Mellerio in a 2009 issue titled "Mellerio, magnificent jeweller of the Art Nouveau," placing the house firmly in the naturalistic tradition.
This positioned Mellerio differently from Cartier Paris under Louis Cartier, whose garland style moved toward restrained platinum lace-work and geometric composition. Both were working in the same elite market at the same period and on the same street, but the aesthetic registers were distinct.
No documented record of direct interaction or stated rivalry between the Mellerio and Cartier families has been found in the sources available. When Cartier arrived at number 13 in 1899, Mellerio was simply the most established presence on the street: the house that had been there longest, with the deepest royal connections, and to which any newcomer was inevitably being compared.
Sources
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 13, 24 et al.
- Mellerio dits Meller, Wikipedia (English and French editions)
- Jacqueline Viruega, La bijouterie parisienne (L'Harmattan, 2004), cited in Wikipedia
- Henri Vever, La bijouterie française au XIXe siècle (H. Floury, 1906), cited in Wikipedia
- L'Estampille L'Objet d'art, no. 452 (December 2009)
- Almanach des 25000 adresses (1835), cited in Wikipedia
- Suzy Menkes, "Jewels That Could Tell 400 Years of History," New York Times, 22 October 2013
