Gems
Dreaming of India (II): engraved gemstones and Mughal influence in Art Deco jewellery
By the 1910s, leading European jewellers were rediscovering the aesthetics of Mughal India through carved gems - emeralds, rubies, and spinels - brought back from India by maharajas, merchants, collectors, and British residents of the Raj (1858–1947). These dazzling stones, vibrant with the colours of India and bearing witness to a refined Indo-Islamic lapidary tradition, were removed from their original mounts, reworked, and sometimes recut to suit modern tastes.
Cartier, Chaumet, Janesich, Mauboussin, and Dusausoy all found in India a fertile source of ornamental renewal. The Western imagination embraced the exuberant colours of carved gems. What would later be known as the “Tutti Frutti” style - perfected by Cartier in the 1920s - became one of its most iconic expressions: asymmetrical clusters, material contrasts, and stylised floral bursts.
Many of these gems resurfaced on the market through discreet sales by Indian princely families, often via bazaars in Delhi, Jaipur, or Calcutta. They then passed through the hands of specialised dealers, like Jacques Cartier or Georges Chaumet during their travels, or the Rubel brothers in Paris, before being set in European workshops in line with the emerging aesthetics of Art Deco.
GemGenève 2025: A Crossroads of Influence, from Paris to an Imagined India
Held during the ninth edition of the fair, the exhibition Art Deco: A Legacy of Timeless Elegance, curated by Mathieu Dekeukelaire (Director, GemGenève), traced the creative richness of the 1910–1939 period through an exceptional corpus of jewels, objets d'art, and archival documents. Far from any rigid academicism, Art Deco was presented as a crucible of global influence: from Egypt to East Asia, and notably India, whose contribution, too often sidelined, proved essential in the ornamental renewal of interwar jewellery.
Mathieu Dekeukelaire emphasised the era’s thirst for elsewhere, a yearning that infused all the decorative arts. In the field of jewellery, the Indo-Mughal aesthetics of carved stones, floral arabesques, and chromatic contrasts became one of the period's most fertile visual idioms. Cartier, Marcus & Co., Chaumet, as well as now lesser-known maisons like Janesich or Marchak, drew on this heritage and transposed it into the geometric and rational language of Art Deco.
The exhibition revealed the full formal density and symbolic resonance of these dialogues.
Chaumet: Reinventing a lapidary Orient
In 1910–1911, Georges Chaumet travelled to India, where he discovered the traditions of Mughal gem carving. Upon his return to Paris, the maison began incorporating rubies and emeralds carved with stylised vegetal motifs into its creations, in a vocabulary inspired by Indo-Islamic art.
A refined interpretation of this influence appears in a jabot pin (c. 1920) in platinum and gold: each end capped with a ruby carved in leaf form, framed by rose-cut diamonds - a jewel of Oriental inspiration adapted to European fashion. Jabot pins, worn on jackets, jabots, or hats, were then highly fashionable.
In 1927, the house designed a spectacular "cravat" brooch in gold and platinum, combining calibrated rubies, onyx plaques, and carved emeralds. Its articulated central motif evokes the skyscrapers of Manhattan, while the vivid palette of green, red, black, and white translates an imagined India into the urban abstraction of Art Deco.
Marcus & Co.: New York sophistication and engraved emerald cabochons
Asked about her selection criteria for the Faerber Collection loan, exhibition partner Ida Faerber explains: “Art Deco was a rich and multifaceted period, marked by a plurality of influences. I chose a brooch by Marcus & Co. set with two carved emeralds, which illustrates the assimilation of Indian craftsmanship."
This jabot brooch (c.1920) exemplifies the technical refinement and ornamental audacity of the New York maison: two carved emerald cabochons cap a platinum openwork structure set with circular, baguette, and marquise-cut diamonds, accented by onyx and triangular-cut emeralds. Transformable into a pair of clips, the piece combines architectural modernity with lapidary memory in a formal language born of transcultural dialogue.
Diversity of workshops
Other jewellers and anonymous ateliers also produced remarkable Art Deco pieces. One such example is a flexible bracelet presented by Paul Fisher Inc. (c. 1930), in platinum, designed with a continuous floral motif set with carved rubies and old-cut diamonds. The treatment of the stones - likely carved in India - bears witness to lapidary mastery rooted in Mughal workshop traditions. This bracelet elegantly embodies the synthesis of Art Deco formalism and Oriental sensuality.
These carved gems, often shaped long before their Art Deco settings, originate from specialised centres such as Jaipur, Cambay, Delhi, or Hyderabad, where Mughal gem-cutting and engraving techniques were transmitted in anonymous workshops. These artisans, cutters, polishers, enamelers, remain absent from Western archives, yet their craftsmanship endures.
Leading Dealers at GemGenève: Fragments of a reimagined Orient
Several dealers at GemGenève 2025 highlighted the enduring presence of Mughal and Indian aesthetics in Art Deco jewellery, with carved emeralds occupying centre stage.
Ernst Färber displayed a spectacular rectangular emerald engraved with a lush poppy blossom, mounted in yellow gold and paired with multiple strands of fine ruby beads. The Munich-based house also presented a necklace of Colombian emerald beads carved in melon slices, typical of late Mughal art, interspersed with fine pearls and rock crystal capsules engraved and set with calibrated rubies.
Giuseppe Torroni featured an Indian-inspired emerald brooch signed Raymond Yard, one of New York high society's favourite jewellers. Paul Fisher Inc. showed a "Tutti Frutti" demi-parure (necklace and earrings), unsigned, in yellow gold and diamonds, set with cabochon sapphires and rubies, carved emerald leaves, and paisley motifs topped with round diamonds.
Zebrak presented a Janesich bracelet adorned with melon-carved emeralds, accentuated with fine pearls and tubular diamond-and-platinum motifs. The interplay between rounded and taut lines offered a poetic interpretation of Indian vocabulary reformulated through the Art Deco grid. A Tutti Frutti necklace signed Mauboussin also exemplified this encounter between French taste and Indian imagination: adorned with carved coloured stones, it featured a flower vase pendant - a central motif in Mughal iconography - subtly reinterpreted. A highlight: a long platinum sautoir whose chain, set with diamonds and calibrated emeralds, culminated in a pendant composed of oblong emerald beads, a large polished hexagonal emerald, and a cabochon carved with a floral motif. A clear homage to a necklace created by Cartier London in 1927, the piece is built around a historical pendant - a quintessential example of the "Indian style" developed by the maison during the interwar years. It also recalls a brooch worn by Marjorie Merriweather Post in a 1929 portrait by Giulio de Blaas alongside her daughter Nedenia (Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens, acc. no. 51.146).
Horovitz & Totah also contributed to this reimagining with a 1935 Cartier vanity case in "Hindu" style, finely decorated with partially enamelled birds and wild animals, topped with an agate plaque set with a sculpted sapphire.
Between Authenticity and Reinterpretation: The Ambiguities of Carved Gems
The current enthusiasm for carved gems and historic forms raises a fundamental question: how can one distinguish an authentically old Indian gem from a contemporary creation inspired by Mughal styles?
In an era of historically inspired recreations, in which natural gems are recut to emulate seventeenth - or eighteenth - century styles, the boundary between the genuine and the pastiche is increasingly blurred. An old gem may be mounted in a 1920s jewel; a recent gem may be engraved in a style that imitates Mughal art.
Canadian master lapidary Patrick Dubuc reflects on this challenge with both humility and insight: "I engraved the Shahs using a digital graver, an oil-lubricated steel tip set with a small diamond. After numerous passes, the result was astonishing. What always intrigued me was how Mughal artisans managed to engrave diamonds with such precision, without our modern tools. A rotary tool? A vibrating tip? Or were some of the pieces reworked later?"
For Patrick Dubuc, the difference lies in subtle details, perceptible only to a trained eye. Today’s digital tools can achieve a level of finesse often greater than that of historical engravings. Yet modern polishing is too perfect. "On older pieces, you can detect micro-irregularities, wear, and abrasive marks that betray the human hand. Even the symmetry can reveal modernity: too crisp, too precise."
Indeed, ancient gems often display a soft patina, irregular facets, or traces of primitive tools. Conversely, recent stones, even when cut in a historical spirit, frequently exhibit flawless polish, perfect geometry, and no time-induced marks.
Dubuc reminds us that without documented provenance, even the most sophisticated expertise cannot guarantee certainty. As early as the 1910s, Chaumet’s workshops were hand-carving stones in a style inspired by Mughal motifs. At the same time, Jacques Cartier was acquiring authentic carved gems in India and remounting them in modernist compositions. In the 1940s, Suzanne Belperron re-used ancient carved emeralds in radically modern jewels. These practices further obscure chronological certainties.
Fima Diamonds adds that material analysis also plays a role. An old gem, rose or flat-cut, carved or not, often shows gentle asymmetry, irregular proportions, and diffuse brilliance. Cut for candlelight, these stones bear the marks of handcraft: non-standard shapes, open culets, broad and off-centre facets. Some even show remnants of previous mounts: softened edges, minor abrasions, faint scratches.
True connoisseurship, as Dubuc emphasises, demands humility. Much depends on intuition and empirical observation. Fima Diamonds notes that no single criterion suffices. In the absence of provenance, only a cross-reading between lapidary, dealer, gemmologist, and historian allows for a cautious appreciation of a gem’s true antiquity.
The Indo-Deco Opulence of Mauboussin
Among the few surviving pieces from the ensemble presented by Mauboussin at the 1939 New York World's Fair, one transformable necklace—sold at Sotheby’s Geneva on 13 May 2025—marks a milestone in the history of haute joaillerie. Dated circa 1935, it illustrates how the maison, at the peak of its creative powers, fused Indian ornamental heritage with the chromatic and geometric codes of Art Deco.
Designed as a cascading garland of engraved gemstones, enhanced with a twisted strand of faceted sapphire beads, the necklace blends motifs from Mughal ornamentation (volumes, colour contrasts) with a daring construction based on volumetric tension and flowing lines.
The gem engraving itself continues the lapidary traditions of imperial India, where emeralds were carved by hand with foliate motifs. The detachable clasp transforms into a brooch: a central cabochon sapphire framed by a rosette of carved emeralds and rubies, set with baguette diamonds—a reinterpretation of Mughal floral rosettes in the idiom of Art Deco.
The piece could be worn as a long necklace, a choker, or as two bracelets, reflecting the vogue for modular jewellery on the eve of the Second World War. Presented in the French pavilion of the 1939–1940 Fair, the piece was admired by millions of visitors. Reproduced in Marguerite de Cerval’s monograph (Mauboussin, 1992, p. 118), it features in the official iconography of the event. The pavilion, a showcase of national savoir-faire, embodied a form of French elegance open to extra-European decorative traditions, a diplomatic art of taste blending modernity and appropriation.
By the mid-1920s, Mauboussin’s coloured stone creations had gained international recognition. The maison’s collaboration with American jewellers Trabert & Hoeffer ensured visibility in Hollywood: its parures appeared in films worn by Marlene Dietrich, Claudette Colbert, and Madeleine Carroll, symbolising a cosmopolitan luxury linking Paris, New York, and the California studios.
Highlighted again through its auction, the necklace stands as one of the last great witnesses to the dialogue between French jewellery and Mughal aesthetics at the close of the Art Deco era.
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GemGenève: GemGenève is an international high jewellery fair founded in 2018 by Thomas Faerber and Ronny Totah, two leading figures in the trade of precious stones and historic jewels. A descendant of a Swiss family of dealers, Thomas Faerber made his mark as early as 1973 by introducing antique jewellery to the International Basel Fair, and later contributed to enriching the collections of the Louvre, an achievement for which he was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Ronny Totah, a passionate Geneva-based jeweller, is renowned for his expertise in Kashmir sapphires, natural pearls, and coloured diamonds. Together, they envisioned GemGenève as an independent and welcoming platform dedicated to exceptional gemstones, intergenerational dialogue, and the transmission of craftsmanship.
Patrick Dubuc : Dubuc créations gemmes
1e place GRAND MASTER USFG 2015
1e place MASTER USFG 2014
2e place PRE-MASTER USFG 2013
Info@dubuccreationsgemmes.com
FIMA
Natural Diamond manufacturer&wholesaler.
Providing Jewelers and Designers with Unique Diamonds 2ct+ One of a kind.
diamondsfima@fimadiamonds.com
Coming next: Dreaming of India (III): Mughal influences and engraved gemstones in contemporary jewellery
