Jean Schlumberger (1907-1987) was a French jeweller who, from 1956 onward, served as the principal designer at Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York. His work for Tiffany, with its naturalistic and fantastical subjects rendered in fine three-dimensional gold and platinum work and its often deliberately eccentric stone settings, became one of the most distinctive and influential bodies of design in twentieth-century American haute joaillerie. Schlumberger occupies a place in the Tiffany history equivalent in some respects to that of Jeanne Toussaint at Cartier or Aldo Cipullo's later design contribution.

Early Life and Training

Schlumberger was born in Mulhouse in Alsace in 1907 to a textile-industry family and received no formal training in jewellery. He moved to Paris in his early twenties and worked first as a design draughtsman in the textile and decoration trades, and then began making costume jewellery for the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli in the late 1930s. His early Schiaparelli-period pieces, sometimes incorporating found objects and unusual figural elements, attracted the attention of the haute joaillerie trade and laid the groundwork for his subsequent career in fine jewellery.

War Service

Schlumberger served with the Free French forces in the Second World War, including service in North Africa and at the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, and was decorated for his service. He returned to civilian work after the war and opened a New York jewellery studio in 1946 with his business partner Nicolas Bongard.

Tiffany & Co. Years

In 1956 Walter Hoving, the chairman of Tiffany & Co., recruited Schlumberger as the firm's principal designer, granting him an unusual degree of independence including a private workshop on the upper floors of the Fifth Avenue store and the public attribution of his designs in his own name, an unusual arrangement at the time. Schlumberger remained at Tiffany until his death in 1987 and produced a continuous body of work across more than three decades.

Design Vocabulary

Schlumberger's design vocabulary at Tiffany was rooted in marine, botanical and zoological subjects, with sea creatures, flowers, leaves, birds, fish, dolphins, jellyfish, urchins, starfish and shells recurring across the work. The rendering is naturalistic but stylised, with three-dimensional construction in gold or platinum and stone settings that are often unconventional. The Bird on a Rock brooch, with a bird perched on a major coloured stone, was created for clients including Bunny Mellon and remains an emblematic Schlumberger form.

Stone-setting at Schlumberger is intentionally eccentric. He frequently used coloured stones of irregular shape and size, set them at unusual angles, and combined materials in ways that ran against the conventional haute joaillerie practice of his time. The use of pavonazzo enamel as a luminous orange-red enamel ground was a Schlumberger signature.

Notable Clients and Commissions

Schlumberger's clientele at Tiffany included Bunny Mellon, who became his closest patron and commissioned multiple major pieces, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Babe Paley, Diana Vreeland, the Duchess of Windsor, and Audrey Hepburn. The Bird on a Rock brooch made to display the 128.54-carat Tiffany Yellow Diamond, originally cut in 1879 from the Kimberley diamond rough, was perhaps the most publicly visible of his pieces and has been worn by Audrey Hepburn for the Breakfast at Tiffany's promotional campaign in 1961, by Lady Gaga at the 2019 Academy Awards, and by Beyoncé in subsequent commercial campaigns.

Tiffany Yellow Diamond

The Tiffany Yellow Diamond, owned by the firm since 1878, has been mounted in several Schlumberger settings over the decades, with the Bird on a Rock setting being the most enduring and most-photographed of these mounts.

Legacy

Schlumberger's work has remained in continuous production at Tiffany since his death, with the existing designs reissued under the Schlumberger name and with the original archive of designs maintained as a permanent reference for the firm. He was awarded the Legion of Honour by France in recognition of his work, and his pieces are held in the permanent collections of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and other major institutions.