Pierre Lemarchand was one of the senior designers at Cartier Paris in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, a period that produced some of the house's most technically demanding and symbolically charged work. Two bodies of work define his career: the three-dimensional panther jewels that emerged from the Paris workshops from the 1940s onward, and the bird brooches of the wartime occupation, which carry a different kind of weight entirely.
The Bird Brooches
During the German occupation of Paris, Lemarchand designed a brooch that showed a bird in a cage. The piece was placed in the Cartier Paris window in 1942. The symbolism was legible to Parisians, though the German occupiers, while apparently suspicious, were unable to prove the intent. It sold.
When Paris was liberated in August 1944, Lemarchand created a companion piece. The new brooch showed a bird free of the cage, its wings spread, singing. The colours were deliberate: red coral, white diamonds, blue lapis lazuli, France's national tricolour. The German occupiers had apparently suspected but never been able to prove the symbolism of the caged bird; the victory version made no attempt to conceal it. In time the piece came to stand as a symbol of the Liberation, and of Paris's return to itself.
The Panther Jewels
The three-dimensional panther brooches and bracelets that Cartier Paris produced from the 1940s are among the most technically demanding goldsmithing the firm ever undertook. The pieces required the body to be constructed in sections, each independently hinged, so that the whole would flex and move, drawing on the skills of the specialist atelier network. The typical palette was diamonds pavé-set across the body, with black onyx patches for the markings, and coloured stone eyes. Lemarchand was the designer most directly responsible for giving the panther motif its definitive sculptural form.
He made regular visits to the Paris zoo on lunch breaks, sketching animals alongside colleagues including Dennis Gardner, who was later at Cartier London. The zoo visits were a regular part of the design process: direct observation of the animals, not just reference books or existing motifs.
Jeanne Toussaint was closely associated with the panther theme throughout her years as artistic director in Paris, and the relationship between her vision and Lemarchand's draughtsmanship shaped the pieces. The full story of the panther motif's origins is discussed in detail at The Inspiration Behind the Cartier Panthers.
The range between the bird brooches and the panther jewels (spare symbolic work on one side, exuberant sculptural extravagance on the other) gives some sense of what distinguished the best designers working at Cartier in the mid-century period.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 9 (“The World at War, 1939–1944”) and ch. 10 (“Cousins in Austerity, 1945–1956”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 139, 183 et al.
