Gabriel Lemonnier (1808-1884) was a Parisian goldsmith and crown jeweller of the Second Empire who supplied a series of significant pieces to Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie, and whose surviving work today sits in the French Crown Jewels collection at the Louvre and on long-term loan to other state museums. Although less remembered in the popular literature than Cartier or Boucheron, Lemonnier occupies a particular place in the history of nineteenth-century French jewellery as the maker entrusted with the resetting of the Imperial diamonds for Eugenie's coronation jewels.

Biography

Born in Rouen in 1808, Lemonnier was trained in the Parisian goldsmithing tradition and established his own workshop on the Place Vendome in the 1830s. He gained Imperial patronage in the early years of the Second Empire and, after the abolition of the title of Joaillier de la Couronne proper, served in effect as the official Crown jeweller for several of the most important resetting commissions of the 1850s. He retired from the Place Vendome workshop in the late 1860s and died in 1884.

The Imperial commissions

Lemonnier's most celebrated surviving work is the Empress Eugenie's pearl-and-diamond tiara of 1853. Designed in the Greek-key (a la Grecque) idiom that was fashionable in the early Second Empire, the diadem is set with a large old-mine and rose-cut diamonds and seventeen pear-shape natural pearls, the largest pendent at the centre. The piece survived the dispersal of the French Crown Jewels at the 1887 sale and was later acquired for the Louvre, where it remains on display in the Galerie d'Apollon.

A second well-documented Lemonnier commission is the Empress Eugenie's Couronne of 1855, a small Imperial crown set with the Regent diamond at the centre - a 140.64-carat colourless cushion which is itself one of the most famous diamonds in the French collections. The Regent was removed for the 1887 sale of the Crown Jewels but the Lemonnier mount survives, also in the Louvre, and the Regent has been replaced in it for periods of public display.

Other Lemonnier work for the Imperial household included a diamond corsage ornament of 1855 (the so-called broche reliquaire) incorporating older stones from the Crown collection, and several parures for diplomatic gift use. He also executed private commissions for the wider Imperial circle.

Style

Lemonnier's design vocabulary was firmly historicist. The 1853 tiara's Greek-key motif was a deliberate reference to Hellenistic and First Empire precedents, and the bow-and-pearl drops echoed the eighteenth-century Bourbon taste that the Bonaparte court self-consciously revived. His settings privilege restrained openwork in silver-on-gold, allowing maximum light return through the Crown stones - many of them cushion-cut goods of Indian origin recut for the Imperial mounts in the 1840s and 1850s. He was less an innovator than a virtuoso of the established Crown idiom, and his commissions are valued today as much for the historical stones they contain as for the metalwork itself.

Aftermath and the 1887 sale

The Third Republic dispersed the bulk of the French Crown Jewels at auction in May 1887, and many of Lemonnier's mounts were broken up at that time, the stones sold off to American and European collectors and dealers. The objects that survive intact - the 1853 tiara, the 1855 small crown - were withheld from sale specifically because of their historical importance and were transferred to the Louvre. A small additional group was retained for the National School of Mines and the Museum of Natural History. Pieces of Lemonnier work in private hands are now extremely rare and are regularly catalogued in major French jewellery sales when they appear.

Trade significance

For collectors, a documented Lemonnier mount carries a substantial provenance premium, particularly where the stones can be matched to the 1850s inventories. The Louvre's Galerie d'Apollon installation, which combines the surviving Bourbon and Imperial regalia, remains the principal place to study the work in person. The firm did not survive Lemonnier's retirement in any continuous form and there is no modern Maison trading on the name.