Ambaji Vaman Shinde, born in 1918 in the small town of Sawantwadi on the Konkan coast of what was then the Bombay Presidency, became one of the most influential jewellery designers of the second half of the twentieth century. From his joining of Harry Winston in New York in 1962 until his retirement in 2003, Shinde produced design drawings that shaped the visual identity of one of the most prestigious houses in the diamond trade. His career is also a case study in the international transmission of Indian design traditions into the heart of American haute joaillerie.

Early career in Bombay

Shinde studied at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay, the foremost art-school in India during the late colonial period, training in drawing, painting, and design. He joined the studios of Nanubhai Jewellers in Bombay after graduation, where he learned the discipline of Indian high jewellery — the use of articulated movement, polychromatic stone-setting, and the dense ornamental vocabulary inherited from Mughal and Maratha traditions. He worked at Nanubhai through the 1940s and 1950s, by which point he had established a reputation as one of the leading designers in the city.

Harry Winston

In 1962, Harry Winston himself recruited Shinde to New York. Winston was at that point the foremost American dealer in important diamonds and exceptional coloured stones, with a clientele that included royalty, heiresses, and the better part of mid-century international society. Shinde's role at the firm was as senior designer, responsible for translating the firm's stones — many of them historic and many of them entering the firm's hands one at a time — into wearable settings.

Shinde's gouache-on-paper drawings, executed in the traditional Indian jeweller's medium of opaque watercolour, became the working documents from which Harry Winston's finest pieces were realised. The Winston archive contains thousands of his designs. They are characterised by the discipline of the form, the precision of the rendering, and a particular sensitivity to the proportional weight of large stones in finished settings.

Among the projects attributed to Shinde during his Winston tenure are settings for the Star of Independence, the Indore Pears, the Lesotho diamonds purchased by Aristotle Onassis for Jacqueline Kennedy, and many of the period's most significant single-stone commissions. Shinde was named senior designer at Harry Winston in 1989 and continued to draw until shortly before his retirement in 2003.

Indian design tradition in New York

Shinde's contribution to Harry Winston was not the addition of obviously Indian motifs to American jewellery; he produced designs in the Winston classical idiom — clusters, links, marquise-cut combinations, the firm's signature wreath structures. His Indian training showed in subtler ways: in the articulated mounting of large stones to allow movement on the body, in the proportional handling of the relationships between centre stones and pavé surrounds, and in the discipline of polychromatic combinations when his commissions called for them.

Recognition and legacy

Shinde was the subject of a 2018 retrospective at the Indian Embassy in Washington and has been honoured by Indian jewellery industry bodies. He died in 2003. Several of his original drawings have entered museum collections, including holdings at the Smithsonian. Within the Winston archive his designs continue to be studied as the firm trains successive generations of designers in its house style.

In the trade

Shinde's career stands as a reminder that the great American jewellery houses of the twentieth century drew on technical and design lineages from across the world. His own success, working from his Bombay training into the most rarefied tier of New York haute joaillerie, was the result of an exceptional command of drawing, an unusual sensitivity to scale, and four decades of consistent practice in service of a single house's vocabulary.

Further reading

• Harry Winston — house history