Mastery of Design: The Parisian Basket of Flowers Brooch, 1830

Basket of Flowers Brooch
French, 1830
The Victoria & Albert Museum

Today’s sparkler comes from Paris and dates to about 1830. The work of an unknown maker, this brooch of gold, emerald, turquoises and topazes is in the form of a stylised basket of flowers—a popular subject for jewelry at the time.


Jewels of the 1830s often relied on natural themes. According to the V&A, “a love of nature was one of the most universal and respected sentiments in the 19th century.” This reliance on nature was one of the cornerstones of the Romantic Movement and stemmed from the revival of the Rococo style, which had developed earlier in the period.

Around this time, these jewels offered very precise copies of the flowers, leaves, fruit and insects that they depicted and gave rise to substantial, brilliant and complex compositions. While this example is more stylized than those created later in the Nineteenth Century, we can see the development of the realism that would soon take hold. And certainly the beginnings of the experiments with colorful stones is quite evident.