The Mikimoto Pearl Crown is the colloquial name for an exhibition crown produced by K. Mikimoto & Co. for the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. Modelled in silver and platinum-coloured metalwork and set with several hundred Akoya cultured pearls and accenting diamonds, the crown was Mikimoto's principal exhibit at the fair and one of three major exhibition pieces, alongside the earlier Pearl Pagoda of 1926 and the later Pearl Castle of 1939, by which the firm announced the maturity of Japanese cultured pearl production to Western audiences.

It is necessary at the outset to distinguish this object from later "Pearl Crown" pieces sold or shown by Mikimoto under the same generic label. The Mikimoto company has produced a small succession of crown-form exhibition objects through the twentieth century, and museum collections occasionally use the name interchangeably for any of them. In trade and gemmological literature the 1937 Paris piece is the principal referent.

Origins and exposition strategy

The 1937 Paris Exposition fell during a period of intense controversy over the cultured pearl. Although the 1924 Paris court ruling had clarified that cultured pearls could be sold provided they were disclosed as cultured, individual European jewellers and natural-pearl dealers continued to dispute the standing of the Japanese product through the 1930s. Kokichi Mikimoto's response, characteristic of his entire career, was to use the international expositions as theatres in which the cultural and craft credentials of cultured pearls could be demonstrated at a scale impossible to dismiss. The Pearl Crown was that demonstration's centrepiece in 1937.

Construction

The crown is a tall, openwork structure of silver-toned metal in which the surface is almost entirely clad in pearls. Mikimoto company records describe the use of graduated Akoya pearls of small to medium size, with the smallest filling fine surface tracery and larger pearls anchoring crosses, fleurs-de-lys and finials at the rim. Diamonds are used sparingly, as accents at the principal architectural points rather than as substantive setting material. The form is loosely modelled on European royal crowns of the early modern period, a deliberate choice that placed the cultured pearl in dialogue with the dynastic jewels of the European houses then exhibiting at the same fair.

Subsequent history

After 1937 the crown returned to Japan and was held in the Mikimoto company collection. It is presently part of the holdings of Mikimoto Pearl Island at Toba in Mie Prefecture, where the company maintains its historical museum on the island where Kokichi Mikimoto first cultured pearls in 1893. The crown has been exhibited intermittently in Japan and abroad as part of touring exhibitions of Mikimoto's exposition pieces.

Place in the cultured pearl story

For students of the pearl trade the 1937 crown belongs to the same family as the Pearl Pagoda and Pearl Castle: a sequence of objects built not for sale but to communicate, in the most concrete terms available, that Japanese pearl culturing had reached a quality and consistency sufficient to dress an object on the scale of European royal regalia. The crown's more deliberate dialogue with European royal jewellery makes it the most rhetorically pointed of the three. It is, in effect, an argument in pearls that the new Japanese product could stand in the same room as the natural pearls of the Hohenzollerns or the Romanovs and not be diminished. The argument was largely accepted, and the post-war pearl trade, both in Tokyo and in Place Vendôme, took shape on the foundations these expositions laid.