Jules Fossin (1808-1869) was a French jeweller of the early nineteenth century who, with his father François-Régnault Fossin, took over the Paris workshop founded by Marie-Étienne Nitot, jeweller to Napoléon I. Their firm Fossin et Fils, in operation from 1830 to roughly 1862, is one of the direct ancestors of the modern Maison Chaumet and a key bridge between the Empire style and the historicist taste of the Second Empire.

Family background

The Fossin family had worked under Nitot as senior craftsmen in the early years of the nineteenth century. When Nitot's son François-Régnault Nitot retired and sold the business in 1815, the workshop passed first to Jean-Baptiste Fossin, then to François-Régnault Fossin, and ultimately to Jules Fossin. The continuity of premises, clients and workforce from Nitot to Fossin was unusually direct, and many of the design vocabularies of the Empire period continued in Fossin work in modified forms.

Style and clientele

Under Jules Fossin the firm specialised in jewels in the late Romantic and early Second Empire taste. Naturalistic sprays of flowers and leaves, often with stones cut and set en tremblant, became a Fossin signature. The firm continued the Empire tradition of high-quality cameo and intaglio mountings, and produced tiaras, necklaces and parures for the new financial and political elite of Louis-Philippe's France and, after 1852, of Napoléon III's Second Empire. Clients included members of the Orléans and Bonaparte families, the Russian and German courts, and the rising Paris and London plutocracy.

Technical contributions

Fossin was an active early adopter of platinum settings for diamond jewels, in advance of the platinum-led Belle Époque period that followed. The firm continued to refine the en tremblant flower mechanisms, in which a stem fitted with a small spring allowed the flowerhead to vibrate gently with the wearer's movement, creating an animated play of light. These mechanisms had antecedents in the eighteenth century but reached one of their most refined forms in Fossin work.

Succession

Jules Fossin sold the business around 1862 to his foreman Jean-Valentin Morel, whose son Prosper Morel later took the firm in turn. Prosper Morel's daughter Marie married Joseph Chaumet in 1875, completing the chain of ownership that ran from Nitot through Fossin and Morel to Chaumet. The premises remained at 12 Place Vendôme through this entire succession.

Significance

For the jewellery trade Jules Fossin matters as the central figure in the second generation of what became the Chaumet line. The Fossin period marks the transition from the strict classicism of Empire work to the more eclectic and naturalistic taste of the mid-nineteenth century, while preserving the technical standards and clientele inherited from Nitot. Surviving Fossin pieces, particularly the en tremblant flowers, are among the finest examples of mid-nineteenth century French jewellery and command serious prices on the secondary market when they appear at auction with documentation.