The Mughal Empire, which ruled much of the Indian subcontinent from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, developed a tradition of carving precious and semi-precious stones into objects of artistic and religious significance. The carvers worked primarily with emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and the orange-red spinels that were often used interchangeably with rubies in Mughal contexts. They also worked tourmalines, aquamarines, and other coloured stones of sufficient hardness.
The typical forms were flat plaques, beads, drops, and pendants, engraved with designs that reflect the visual culture of the Mughal court: leafy arabesque borders, stylised flowers, lotus forms, and occasionally calligraphic inscriptions from the Quran or from Persian poetry. The finest Mughal carved stones were created for the imperial court itself and for the great nobles whose wealth supported comparable artistic production.
Scale and Survival
Mughal gem carving was not a marginal tradition. The imperial workshops produced carved stones in large quantities across three centuries, and the raw material available to them was extraordinary: the Mughal emperors controlled trade routes that gave them access to Colombian emeralds, Burmese rubies and sapphires, and the spinels of Badakhshan. Many carved stones from the Mughal period survived in the treasuries of Indian princely states that had accumulated them through inheritance, conquest, and trade.
By the nineteenth century, carved Mughal gems existed in enormous numbers across India, particularly in the treasuries of the major princely courts. Some were reset in new Indian mountings; many remained as individual carved stones, stored as the treasury assets they were.
The Cartier Connection
When Pierre Cartier and then Jacques Cartier began travelling to India in the early twentieth century, they encountered these stones in the courts they visited. The pieces in the maharaja treasuries were not always in settings the rulers wished to keep: remounting was a regular practice, and stones that had been held loosely or in old-fashioned settings were available for sale or commission.
Jacques Cartier, whose first India visit was for the Delhi Durbar of 1911, returned repeatedly to the subcontinent and acquired quantities of carved Mughal gems during these visits. The stones were brought back to the Paris workshops and presented a specific design challenge: how to mount Indian-carved stones, with their organic shapes, leaf profiles, and engraved surfaces, in contemporary European settings.
The Tutti Frutti Solution
The answer Cartier's designers arrived at, primarily in the 1920s, was to treat the carved stones as elements in a naturalistic arrangement of leaves, flowers, and fruit forms. Rather than imposing a geometric European setting on a Mughal-carved leaf, the setting embraced the leaf form, mounting it as part of a spray of carved emerald leaves, ruby berries, and sapphire or spinel petals arranged around diamonds. The style that resulted, known retrospectively as Tutti Frutti, is inseparable from the Mughal source material.
The carved stones give Indian-style Cartier pieces their specific quality: a carved emerald leaf set in platinum alongside carved ruby berries carries both a Mughal and a European visual tradition in the same object. The commissions, the journeys that produced the raw material, and the design process are explored further in Maharajas and Mughal Magnificence, Cartier and the Maharaja, and Cartier and Persian Islamic Inspiration.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 6 (“New York: Mid-1920s”) and ch. 8 (“Diamonds and Depression: The 1930s”)
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, “Maharajas, Pearls and Oriental Influences: Jacques Cartier's Voyages to the East in the Early Twentieth Century,” JS12:103–115
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 76, 133 et al.
- Wikipedia: Mughal Carved Gemstones
