Joseph Chaumet (1852-1928) was the French jeweller who, having married into the Morel family, gave his name to the Paris house now known as Chaumet. Under his direction from 1885 until his death in 1928, the firm became one of the leading jewellers of the Belle Époque and the Art Deco period, with a clientele drawn from the European royal courts, the Russian and Ottoman aristocracies, and the rising international plutocracy of the early twentieth century.

Early life and trade entry

Joseph Chaumet was born in Bordeaux. He trained in the Paris trade in the 1870s and joined the firm of Prosper Morel, then operating at 12 Place Vendôme. Morel's house was the direct successor to the workshop founded by Marie-Étienne Nitot, jeweller to Napoléon I, through a continuous chain of ownership running from Nitot to Fossin to Morel. In 1875 Joseph Chaumet married Marie Morel, Prosper Morel's daughter. He became director of the firm in 1885 and renamed it Chaumet in 1889.

The Belle Époque firm

Under Joseph Chaumet the house specialised in tiaras, naturalistic jewels and large pieces of court jewellery in the late nineteenth-century manner. The firm produced tiaras for, among others, Empress Eugénie, Queen Victoria, the Russian imperial family and a long list of British, Spanish and central European princely houses. Chaumet's particular technical contribution was a refinement of the platinum-and-millegrain style that came to define Belle Époque jewels: extremely fine knife-edge platinum settings, garlands and laurel-leaf motifs, and stones cut to take maximum advantage of pierced settings against the skin.

Documentation and archives

One of Joseph Chaumet's most important and least publicised contributions was the discipline he imposed on the firm's record-keeping. He continued and extended the systematic photographic and drawing archive that the house had inherited from its predecessors. The Chaumet archive today, held at Place Vendôme, contains tens of thousands of design drawings, plaster casts and photographic plates, and is one of the most important documentary resources in European jewellery history. It has been the foundation of museum exhibitions in Paris, Tokyo, Beijing and Monaco.

The Art Deco transition

By the 1920s Chaumet was making the stylistic transition from Belle Époque naturalism to Art Deco geometry. Joseph Chaumet's son Marcel Chaumet, who had joined the firm earlier and would succeed him, drove much of the new design vocabulary, but Joseph remained involved in the major commissions of the early Art Deco period. The firm's pieces from this transitional period are now particularly sought at auction.

Death and succession

Joseph Chaumet died in 1928. The firm passed to his sons Marcel and Jacques, who continued operations through the difficult interwar and wartime years. The house has gone through several ownership changes since, most importantly its acquisition by the LVMH group in 1999, but has remained at 12 Place Vendôme throughout.

Trade significance

Joseph Chaumet sits at the centre of the Place Vendôme tradition. His most enduring contributions are the firm's archive system, which has given Chaumet an unusual capacity for historical reissue and exhibition, and the technical refinement of platinum jewellery in the Belle Époque, which set a standard that other major Paris and London houses had to match. Without him, much of the documentary record of nineteenth-century French haute joaillerie would not exist.