Plique-à-jour enamel earrings

Where true beauty and splendour meet: Art Nouveau long pendent earrings – Art Nouveau as you want it to be. The two rectangular enameled plates are made using a very special technique, known as the plique-à-jour enamelling technique. "Plique-à-jour" comes from French, meaning "braid letting in daylight." It is a very challenging vitreous enamelling technique where the enamel is applied in cells to give a stained glass appearance.

However, these earrings were not originally created as earrings. Most likely, they began their life as decorative elements in a chain or dog-collar necklace during the Art Nouveau period, somewhere between 1890 and 1900. When we acquired them, they had been mounted together in a single brooch. This brooch—more accurately, a bulky gold framework with a needle at the back—was likely made between 1930 and 1950 and specifically designed to hold the two plaques.

Because the framework wasn’t original and did not do justice to the high quality of the original Art Nouveau work, we decided to remount them in a setting that would enhance their beauty. Our master goldsmith carefully separated them from their bulky framework and designed a refined mounting that honours their true splendour. He did so by drawing inspiration from the Art Nouveau style and imagining how a goldsmith from that era might have designed them.

The result is astonishing!

‍Click here to get to these truly magnificent earrings.

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