Jules Lacloche was the co-founder, with his three brothers Fernand, Léopold and Jacques, of the Paris and London jewellery house Lacloche Frères, one of the leading firms of the late Belle Époque and Art Deco periods. The firm operated from the late 1890s until 1931, and at its height ran branches in Paris at 15 rue de la Paix, in London on Bond Street, in Madrid, in Biarritz and at several seasonal resort locations.

Family and firm

The Lacloche brothers came from a Spanish-French Jewish family that had operated a small jewellery business in Madrid before establishing the Paris firm in 1875. The four brothers ran the business jointly. Jules Lacloche led the Paris house and was responsible for much of the design direction during the firm's most productive years from around 1900 to 1930. Fernand Lacloche led the London branch from its opening in 1898, while Léopold and Jacques managed the Madrid and Biarritz operations and the firm's relationships with European royal clients.

Style and major work

Lacloche Frères is best remembered for two distinct phases of work. In the Belle Époque period the firm produced platinum and diamond garlands, tiaras, devant-de-corsage brooches and naturalistic pieces in the late-nineteenth-century manner, on a level competitive with Cartier and Boucheron. In the Art Deco period the firm developed a strong line of geometrically composed pieces in platinum, onyx, coral, jade, lapis lazuli and diamonds, including the celebrated series of Persian and Chinese-influenced jewels and a long-running series of cigarette cases, vanity cases and minaudières decorated with engraved jade and lacquer panels. The firm also produced a series of high-jewellery pieces that were exhibited at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and won the firm a Grand Prix.

Patronage

Clients of the firm included Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, the Spanish royal family more broadly, several Russian grand ducal clients before the Revolution, Indian princely clients, and the international café society of the 1920s. The London Bond Street branch was particularly active in the British and Indian princely market.

Closure

The firm collapsed in 1931 in the wake of the Great Depression and a financial scandal involving its London branch. The remaining stock was dispersed at auction at Christie's in 1932. The Lacloche name continued in modified form through Jacques Lacloche, who reopened a small successor firm after the Second World War, but the great period of the original firm ended in 1931.

Significance

For the trade Jules Lacloche and the firm he led with his brothers represent one of the great might-have-beens of twentieth-century jewellery. At their peak in the 1920s Lacloche Frères were stylistic peers of Cartier and Boucheron, with a particularly fine sense of materials and proportion in Art Deco composition. The firm's collapse in 1931 removed one of the four or five most important Place Vendôme houses just as Art Deco was about to enter its final phase, and surviving Lacloche pieces of the 1920s are now among the most sought-after Art Deco jewels at auction.