Pendant

This remarkable pendant marks a high point in the three-year partnership of Fouquet, the renowned French jeweller, and Alphonse Mucha, the Czech graphic artist whose work has become synonymous with Art Nouveau style. The two men collaborated from 1899 to 1901, during which time Mucha not only conceived a spectacular series of elaborate jewels executed by Fouquet’s Paris atelier but also designed a sumptuous new Fouquet showroom in the rue Royale, where the interior decoration specifically harmonized with the jewellery. The pendant reflects an early-twentieth-century shift away from the prevailing taste for precious stones in traditional historicist settings toward a new approach in which unorthodox materials were chosen for their contribution to the overall design in the belief that the beauty of a jewel depended on its artistic conception rather than the intrinsic value of its materials.

The pendant was designed by Alphonse Mucha and made by Georges Fouquet.