Mauboussin Paris Carved Rock Crystal, Jadeite and Emerald Brooch

Mauboussin rose in international prominence under the oversight of Georges Mauboussin. With a visionary program of traveling exhibitions of jewelry in mind, Georges moved the firm to rue de Choiseul in 1923, and reorganized the workflow of the sales arm and the workshops, including designers, lapidaries, and setters. Within their spacious private exhibition rooms, out of view of street traffic, they mounted widely celebrated exhibitions centering, successively, on the emerald, the ruby, and the diamond. The shows featured hundreds of original Mauboussin designs as well as historic gems remounted in their avant-garde style. Critically acclaimed, the ruby exhibition of 1930 was covered in L’Illustration as “intelligence in motion”, and resulted in a strong resurgence of the ruby’s popularity and price. This brooch was created in the afterglow of Mauboussin’s astonishing international success in the Roaring Twenties. Though wealth creation was set back by the 1929 crash, and the firm was shaken, its revolutionary idea flow continued into the 1930s. During the Art Moderne period, Marcel and Jean Goulet, descendants of the original founders, the Noury family, found innovative ways to maintain close relationships with their sophisticated and intellectual international clientele, including royal families, while continuing their focus on strong modernist design.