Pendeloque — The French Term for the Pear-Drop Cut
Pendeloque — The French Term for the Pear-Drop Cut
An eighteenth and nineteenth-century French nomenclature for the pear-shaped brilliant, still encountered in antique jewellery descriptions
Pendeloque is the French term for a pear-shaped or drop-shaped gemstone cut, synonymous in modern usage with the pear brilliant. The word also names the broader category of drop-shaped pendant ornament — including the multi-stone girandole-style earring drops of the eighteenth century — and that double meaning is why the term still appears regularly in auction catalogues and antique-jewellery descriptions even though contemporary trade nomenclature has largely settled on pear cut or pear shape in English.
The cut
A pendeloque outline combines a rounded shoulder at one end with a tapered point at the other, the same outline that the trade today simply calls a pear. Faceting is normally a fifty-eight-facet brilliant arrangement modified to suit the asymmetric outline, with eight bezel facets, eight star facets, and the corresponding pavilion mains stepped around the centre line of the stone. The proportions are conventionally evaluated against the same length-to-width ratios that govern modern pear cuts, with ratios of 1.50 to 1.75 considered the most balanced for the form. A pronounced bow-tie of darkness across the centre of the stone is the principal cutting fault, the result of overly steep pavilion angles or insufficient depth in the belly.
Use of the term
French pendeloque enters the English-language record through eighteenth and nineteenth-century jewellery literature, where it is used both for the pear-cut diamond and, more loosely, for the pear-shaped pendant element of an ornament. A girandole earring of the rococo period is built around a top cluster supporting two or three pendeloque drops; the term in that context names the drop element rather than the specific cut of the principal stone. Period auction catalogues — Christie's, Sotheby's, and the older French houses — use the term in both senses, and the reader of an antique-jewellery description must judge from context whether the writer means the cut or the form of the ornament.
In the trade
Modern trade communication outside specialist antique departments uses pear exclusively. The pendeloque term survives principally in three settings: in scholarly writing on eighteenth and nineteenth-century jewellery, in French-language trade literature, and in auction catalogue prose where the word evokes the period associations of the piece being sold. A jeweller describing a stone for a contemporary client should use pear; a jeweller writing for collectors of Georgian or rococo work may still find pendeloque the more accurate term.