Imperfect is Divine: A Talk on Arts & Crafts Jewelry

Learn about Arts and Crafts jewelry with art historican Jeannine Falino.

The mid-nineteenth century art theorist John Ruskin scorned symmetry and order, seeing them as a stifling inheritance from the Italian Renaissance, and preferred the untamed, untutored expressions of man and nature.  He praised the irregularities of medieval stone carvings as inspiring work by hardworking, if uneducated craftsmen and found beauty in rugged stone outcroppings.

Ruskin’s ideas became the foundation for the arts and crafts movement that flourished during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jewelers abandoned diamonds and pearls for colored stones and enamels, as well as such organic materials as horn and abalone. Meanwhile metalsmiths began to see hammer marks as the visible testimony of their workmanship and many retained this evidence as a decorative motif on their vessels.  European and American examples will illustrate the ways and the extent to which artists interpreted this new aesthetic.

Jeannine Falino is an art consultant and the former Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of the Americas, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  With co-author Yvonne Markowitz, she published American Luxury: Jewels from the House of Tiffany in 2007, and she was a consulting curator for Artistic Luxury:  Fabergé – Tiffany – Lalique, at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2008.  She has lectured widely on the subject of American decorative arts and sculpture, with particular emphasis on metalwork and jewelry made from the colonial era to the present day.

Image Copyright: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Emily C. Chadbourne, 1952
Pin, Florence Koehler (1861–1944), 1905. (52.43.1)