After joining the American luxury jewelry house in 1956, he soon had his own studio on the mezzanine of Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue store that he accessed by a private elevator. There, his vibrant work caught the eye of Tiffany & Co.
An extravagant confection of diamonds, amethyst, rubies and gold, the brooch featured gemstones adorning an intricate intersection of tiny spears and a breastplate over a glittering shield.Īfter serving in the French army and the Free French forces during World War II - and surviving the Battle of Dunkirk - Schlumberger left war-torn Europe for New York and in 1946 established a jewelry salon with Nicolas Bongard. The designer’s imaginative jewelry was in contrast to popular geometric lines of Art Deco, an independent vision he affirmed in the extravagant 1941 Trophée de Vaillance brooch created for fashion editor Diana Vreeland. One of Schlumberger’s early pieces - a cigarette lighter in the form of a fish whose head opened to reveal the flame - demonstrated his skill for capturing the vivacity of nature in precious metal.
Uninspired, he departed for Paris and began creating buttons for Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who also commissioned him for costume jewelry. Born to a leading textile manufacturing family in Alsace, France, Schlumberger took to drawing as a child and showed promise as an artist, but his parents instead sent him to study banking in Berlin in the 1930s. Jewelry designer Jean Schlumberger once said that he strived to “make everything look as if it were growing, uneven, at random, organic, in motion.” His jewels interpreted the vitality of the natural world with lively designs that included a moonstone-topped jellyfish brooch with sapphire tentacles exuding a watery shimmer and a ring encrusted with a burst of diamonds that “bloomed” like a flower bud.Ī self-taught jeweler, Schlumberger’s mastery of color as well as his expertise as a draftsman brought his fantastic ideas to life.