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MiriamHaskell 1926-1929 FrankHess Glass Crystal Shell Pearl Coral Silver Sautoir

About the Item

In the late 1920s during the Art-Deco period, this Miriam Haskell white mostly glass-beaded sautoir was created in New York City by her first designer Frank Hess. This uniquely hand-woven necklace features a Baroque-style pendant with a luminous sea-shell crown, pearls and coral, and iridescent clear-glass microbeads. Additionally, both edges of the flat-laying white-square-beaded necklace are spiked with sparkling small faceted crystals that are each capped with a pearl-color glass end-bead, which was Hess' signature way of intricately decorating wired or strung jewelry. Along with the distinct twisted-silver toggle necklace fasteners, the glass beads were handcrafted in France by Parisian Louis Rousselet, who was a parurier to Gabriel "Coco" Chanel since the 1920s when she commissioned ensembles from his workshop for her couture clothing. Only Rousselet could have produced these French-style handmade miniature beads that are uniquely lampworked in a minimal way, which enable the layered, textural, reflective, intricate and overflowing designs of Hess to attract most of the attention. Another design signature of Hess in this sautoir is the asymmetric pendant surrounded by en-tremblant strands of microbeads that seem to move in water like tentacles. Throughout his decades as head designer for Haskle, Hess repeatedly made jewelry with seashell, oyster and coral elements, while this seems to have been among his earliest using these motifs and so is priced accordingly. The necklace, without a metal backing on the pendant, was made prior to the 1930s. During that decade, Hess added a solid plate to hide and better protect delicate or non-decorative attachments like string or wire. No Haskell jewelry was signed before 1947. Fortunately, this much-earlier sautoir is extraordinarily characteristic of Hess motifs and design, along with its identifiable Parisian-produced materials dating to the 1920s. Like this necklace, some of the earliest costume-jewelry by Haskle-Hess feature the most intricate designs and include the tiniest glass beads among those that they used while working together for decades.
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