The first book to explore the role of women, both as inspiration and as designers, in the multiple international art movements that produced unique and sumptuous pieces of handcrafted jewellery between 1890 and 1920.
With exquisite pieces drawn from the Driehaus Collection and major museum collections across the US, Maker and Muse surveys the international approach to art jewellery at the turn of the twentieth century. Authoritative essays by noted scholars explore the development of this movement in England through the British Arts and Crafts, in France through Art Nouveau, in Germany and Austria through Jugenstil and particularly Wiener Werkstatte, and in the United States through the work of Tiffany Studios in New York and American Arts and Crafts in Chicago.
Looking specifically at the art jewellery, women partipated and were perceived differently in each country - as makers in England and America, as unattainable abstract figures in France, and as living models in Germany and Austria. The pieces have distinct characteristics depending on their origin, but they share a common bond of exquisite craftsmanship executed in precious metals and richly coloured enamels and stones.