When my dear friend Jorge Vidal, manager of special projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg offered a tour of the museum’s “Jewels of the Imagination” exhibit, I knew I was in for a treat. I just didn’t realize it would be an intoxicating meal.
The exhibit features the works of designer Jean Schlumberger and the Schlumberger collection of Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon. Jean Schlumberger is most well-known as the designer behind some of Tiffany & Co.’s most famous and fanciful jewelry. His jeweled bird with the 128.54 carat yellow diamond known as “Bird on a Rock,” brooch may be his most famous. It’s not at the exhibit, but no worries, there is plenty of bling to feed the eye.
To say the jewelry at the exhibit is dynamic is an understatement. If you saw someone walking down the street wearing it, you would assume it was costume. You might even call it gaudy. But you can’t keep from looking at the sparkle of the natural gemstones, the gilt of gold and intricacy of the designs. The stones are real sapphires, turquoise, rubies, and diamonds; the metal, real gold and platinum, not something you’ll find on the clearance table after Christmas.
While the jewelry is captivating, most impressive is the curation and design of the exhibit which gives insight to the designer as a man, his process, his close relationship with arguably his biggest patron: Mrs. Mellon, a billionairess whose love of nature paralleled the designer’s. Her passion for gardening is legendary; she designed the rose garden at the White House.)
To see and learn about an artist’s work from concept – his finding of shells to his drawings that incorporate their form, to the resulting intricately detailed jewelry, and finally to the life of the person who wore it – reveals a new dimension to the bling in glass cases. Suddenly, a piece of jewelry that may have seemed too over-the-top makes perfect sense.
The exhibit is two parts. The first is Schlumberger’s story with examples of his early works for Elsa Schiaparelli, those as an independent jeweler, and those designed for Tiffany. My favorites are the whimsical ostrich jewels for Schiaparelli’s “Circus Collection,” which are playful in the way that Betsy Johnson jewelry is, except for superior in every way.
The Schlumberger exhibit flows into that of the Bunny Melon collection, which is on loan from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is the largest individual collection of Schlumberger’s works. Displayed letters between Schlumberger and Melon reveal they were much more than artist and patron.
The setting for this Mellon collection is also a work of art. Rush Jenkins, designer of the exhibition and principal of WRJ Designs (Jackson Hole, WY), used photographs from the Mellon estate to create drapery and wall paintings that give the visitor the feeling of being in Bunny Mellon’s garden.
My friend and guide Jorge stayed at the Mellon estate and met the late Mrs. Mellon’s nurse who shared stories of how wealthy socialite lived with her jewelry, sometimes displaying a favorite jeweled piece on her nightstand. To see the fabulous jewels – a gold, shell-shape brooch paved with sapphires, a jewel-covered sea urchin, a potted daisy of sparkling diamonds – displayed in imagery of Bunny Mellon’s estate brings another dimension to the designs, one of which I’m sure Schlumberger would approve. Arts critics certainly have. The exhibit has been heralded in publications from Forbes to the Tampa Bay Times to Garden & Gun.
How much is the collection worth? Well, that’s something Jorge says the museum does not divulge. But safe to say, security and insurance have been increased.
Be sure to catch the exhibit before it closes on March 31, 2019. For hours and more information visit the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg site.
Jewelry like this calls for fancy shindigs and as I joke about this, Jorge says, it I could afford it, I’d have plenty of fancy shindigs to wear it to.
This was a very interesting article. Thanks!