Alfred Van Cleef and Salomon Arpels established their partnership in 1896, but the firm did not take premises at Place Vendôme until 1906, when they opened at number 22, across from the Hôtel Ritz. By then Boucheron had been on the square for thirteen years and Cartier had been on the adjacent rue de la Paix for seven. Van Cleef and Arpels was the newer arrival in a quarter already defined by its luxury jewellers, and it built its identity accordingly: where the older houses had established reputations, this one had to distinguish itself through novelty.
The firm's design direction crystallised after 1926, when Alfred Van Cleef's daughter Renée Puissant took over artistic leadership, working with draftsman René Sim Lacaze. Under her direction the house became known for floral and naturalistic forms: flowers, birds, fairies, animals, rendered in vivid gemstone combinations. Puissant's approach ran in deliberate counterpoint to the geometric, architectural tendency that Louis Cartier had developed at Cartier Paris. Where Cartier's Art Deco work favoured strong lines, flat planes, and the contrast of black and white, Van Cleef and Arpels under Puissant preferred curved forms, deep colour, and organic movement. The distinction was not lost on the clients who collected from both houses.
The invisible setting
The technique that most clearly identified the house in this period was the invisible setting, in which stones are cut with internal grooves and slid onto a metal rail system so that no metal is visible from above, the gems appearing to float against one another. Van Cleef and Arpels developed this technique intensively in the 1930s; it became known as the Serti Mystérieux and was central to the house's identity for decades.
1925 and shared competition
In 1925 Van Cleef and Arpels won the Grand Prix at the Paris Exposition with a bracelet of ruby and diamond roses, the same event at which Cartier and the other major Paris houses were also exhibiting. The 1925 Exposition was the competitive arena in which these houses measured themselves against each other most visibly, and the Van Cleef entry in that context was a statement of arrival.
Overlapping clientele
Both houses served many of the same clients. Wallis Simpson, who commissioned extensively from Cartier through the 1930s and 1940s, was also a Van Cleef and Arpels client. The Indian maharajas who brought their stones and commissions to the Paris houses during the interwar years were not exclusive to any single address. The shared client pool meant that the two houses were in regular indirect competition, though no documented contemporary statement of rivalry between them has been found in the sources available.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 149, 175 et al.
- Van Cleef and Arpels, Wikipedia
- Marie Serafin, "Van Cleef and Arpels," France Magazine, Fall 2012, cited in Wikipedia
- Paris Exposition 1925, Wikipedia
