Raymond Templier — Architect of Art Deco Jewellery
Raymond Templier — Architect of Art Deco Jewellery
The Parisian modernist who replaced the floral and the figural with geometry, contrast, and machine-age form
Raymond Templier (1891–1968) was a French jeweller and the leading exponent of high-modernist Art Deco jewellery design in inter-war Paris. Born into the third generation of a Parisian jewellery family — his grandfather had founded the firm Templier in 1849 — he trained at the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs and joined the family business in 1919. His significance to twentieth-century jewellery rests on his uncompromising rejection of the floral, figural, and pictorial conventions that had dominated late nineteenth-century practice and his substitution of strict geometric form, machine-age materials, and stark colour contrast as the new aesthetic vocabulary.
The aesthetic break
Templier's mature style emerged in the early 1920s and was crystallised by his work for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes — the exhibition that gave Art Deco its name. His pieces from the period replace organic curves with planar geometry, traditional yellow gold with platinum and white gold, and the conventional jewellery palette with the contrasting black-and-white pairing of polished onyx, frosted rock crystal, and white diamond. Where earlier jewellery framed gemstones in narrative settings — flowers, butterflies, garlands — Templier's work treated stone and metal as architectural elements within a flat, often rectilinear composition.
The influence of contemporary painting and architecture is direct and unconcealed. Templier was a friend of the painter Fernand Léger and worked alongside the designer Marcel Percheron, who collaborated on many of his most ambitious pieces. The visual vocabulary draws from Cubism, from the Bauhaus, and from the early machine aesthetic of Le Corbusier and the Esprit Nouveau circle. Templier's brooches and pendants of the late 1920s and early 1930s often read as miniature paintings or low-relief sculptures rather than as conventional jewellery.
Materials and construction
Platinum and white gold are the principal metals, often combined with yellow gold for accent or with steel for a deliberately industrial edge. The non-precious materials Templier favoured — onyx, hematite, eggshell lacquer, frosted rock crystal, coral, and opaque enamel — were chosen for tonal and textural contribution rather than for inherent value, a position consistent with the broader Art Deco view that design and craftsmanship rather than gem content defined a piece's worth. When Templier did use diamonds, he set them in formats — calibre-cut, baguette, square-step — that emphasised the stone's geometric outline rather than its brilliance.
The construction is meticulous. Templier's workshop produced pieces with extremely tight tolerances, hand-fabricated mountings of considerable complexity, and finishes alternating between high polish and matte texture within a single piece for visual contrast. The technical quality of the work is among the highest of the period and is one of the reasons Templier survives at auction at strong prices.
Notable pieces and exhibitions
Templier showed at the 1925 Exposition, at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs throughout the inter-war period, and at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne. His work was acquired during his lifetime by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, where the most important institutional holding of his pieces is preserved. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London also holds Templier work, as do private collections that have surfaced over the past two decades through major auction sales.
Particular pieces of note include the silver, platinum, and lacquer brooch of 1929 in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the diamond and onyx Cigarette Case of 1930, and a series of platinum and white-gold pendants from the late 1920s in which Templier explored radial and gridded compositions. The work for the actress Brigitte Helm — including pieces designed for her role in the 1932 film L'Atlantide — has acquired further visibility through cinema-history channels.
Templier in the auction market
Authenticated Templier pieces command strong prices at auction, with major brooches, pendants, and bracelets regularly clearing six figures and important pieces of significant scale or provenance reaching seven figures. Christie's, Sotheby's, and the Paris auction houses including Artcurial and Tajan all handle Templier work. The market values originality of design, technical condition, intact lacquer or enamel work, and pieces with documented provenance to the original commission or to recognised collectors of the inter-war period.
Authentication is a specialist undertaking. Templier signed his work, but the Templier firm continued under family direction after Raymond's retirement and produced pieces in a related but distinct register. Auction houses with strong Art Deco departments typically require multiple confirming references for an attribution to Raymond Templier specifically, including comparison with documented exhibition pieces and museum holdings.
In the trade
Templier sits within a small group of inter-war jewellers — including Jean Després, Jean Fouquet, Gérard Sandoz, Suzanne Belperron, and the radical Cartier of the same period — whose work defined the high-Art-Deco moment. Of the group, Templier is perhaps the most consistently uncompromising in his rejection of the floral and figural and the most thoroughly committed to a machine-age aesthetic. For collectors approaching the period, his pieces represent the modernist position at its purest.