Exhibitions
It is no coincidence that the 19th century is known as the century of industrialization. After the aristocratic 18th century, when the choice of clothing and accessories in Europe was determined by the privileges of the nobility, came the French Revolution of 1789. With it, the orders for precious, elite-class diamonds and unique handmade jewelry dried up. The bourgeoisie, with its values of morality, family, and material appreciation, came to the fore in European cities. The battles of Napoleon's armies in the early 19th century led to a significant drop in demand for gold jewelry due to wartime austerity.
Women's jewelry from much simpler materials – polished steel, Berlin cast iron, Italian mosaic, sentimental and mourning jewelry made from natural hair and beads – came to the fore.
In 1837, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, who had grown up in the early 19th century under the influence of the Romantic period, came to the British throne. Thanks to her jewelry, using braids or curls of natural hair framed in glass came into fashion; coral, turquoise, enamel, Italian mosaics, and small natural pearls were typical jewelry for unmarried girls. This period also saw the creation of Love Knots, often made of imitation gold, known as Pinchbeck, a name derived from the jeweler Christopher Pinchbeck, who created a new metal alloy of copper and zinc in London in the early 18th century. It looked pretty respectable, and thanks to its much lower cost than gold, it was very popular with the bourgeoisie. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was used for many ornaments: belt buckles, Portbouquet flower holders, brooches, chatelaines, earrings, diadems, and bracelets. A new feature of Victorian jewelry was its mass production, which coincided with industrialization. Jewelry ateliers emerged to create mass-produced jewelry, thus reducing its cost.
Paired wide bracelets worn on the wrists became a particular feature of 19th-century fashion. Depending on the buyer's budget, they were often made of a black velvet band with a gold-plated metal clasp with stone or glass decoration. Bracelets were often made of beads, hair braids, and strings of natural pearls.
The 19th century saw a growing interest in Italian decorative arts. It was the fashion for cameos on shells, lava from Vesuvius, or coral, and micro mosaics from Rome, Florence, and Venice. While the 1950s and 1960s were dominated by the fashion for brooches, the 1970s and 1980s saw the arrival of pendants set into velvet ribbons or chatelaines attached to the dress belt and decorated with a watch, a small toiletry set, or sewing accessories.
The second Rococo period's jewelry style changed to Historicism, with jewelry reminiscent of Renaissance, Baroque, and even Gothic elements. The tendency towards the exotic in Victorian jewelry introduced an interest in India, Persia, Ottoman Turkey, and in the late 1860s, an interest in Japan, commonly referred to as the Japonisme style.
In the 1890s, Modernism (Art Nouveau) was born in Europe. It is characterized by ornaments with interwoven floral motifs, images of birds, insects, bats, and reptiles, and floral patterns. They included brooches, buckles, pendants, and bracelets, which marked the delicate waistline of the corset. The new movement often used silver, enamel, and castings for its products. It was during the Modernist era that Queen Victoria's reign ended, and she died on the Isle of Wight in 1901.
Alexandre Vassiliev, Fashion Historian, President of the Foundation
The Victorian Era Jewelry Exhibition is open from 20 December 2023 to 30 May 2024. The exhibition is organized by the Liepaja Museum in collaboration with fashion historian Alexandre Vassiliev and the Alexandre Vassiliev Foundation in Lithuania.
Entrance fee: adults EUR 3, schoolchildren, students and senior citizens EUR 2.
