Sentimental locket style
Sentimental locket style
Nineteenth-century lockets for hair, portrait, and photograph
The sentimental locket style is the body of nineteenth-century pendant and brooch jewellery built around hinged compartments designed to hold hair, miniature portraits, photographs, or written inscriptions of personal significance. The form flourished across the Romantic, early Victorian, and high-Victorian periods — roughly 1810 to 1900 — as a domestic object embedded in mourning practice, courtship, separation between sweethearts and family members, and the broader nineteenth-century cult of personal memory. Surviving examples populate the antique-jewellery trade in volume, with quality ranging from fine goldsmith work in the major museum collections to mass-produced gilt brass and pinchbeck examples.
Construction
The standard sentimental locket is a hinged, two-sided pendant or brooch with one or two glazed compartments behind the front, back, or both faces. Compartments are typically circular or oval and sized to hold a lock of hair, a photographic miniature, or a folded paper. Glass covers the compartment to protect the contents and allow visibility. The locket frame may be gold, silver, pinchbeck, gilt brass, or enamelled metal; decoration includes engraved florals, applied gemstones, applied initials in gold or seed pearls, black enamel on gold for mourning examples, and inscriptions of dates, names, or sentimental mottoes.
Lockets are worn as pendants on chains, as brooches with hinged pin and C-catch fittings, or as elements within larger composite jewels — necklace-and-pendant ensembles, suite components in mourning sets. Larger lockets that fold open like books to reveal multiple compartments are termed book lockets and are a recognised sub-form, particularly in mourning and memorial contexts.
Hair, portrait, and photograph
The compartment contents drove the form's popularity. Hair jewellery — locks of the loved one's hair, plaited or laid behind glass — was the most common compartment content in the early-to-mid nineteenth century. Photographic portraits, commercially available from the 1840s onwards as daguerreotypes and ambrotypes and from the 1860s as carte-de-visite cabinet cards, gradually displaced hair as photographic processes became cheap and ubiquitous. Painted miniatures on ivory or vellum, the eighteenth-century tradition that preceded photography, continued in the higher end of the trade through much of the nineteenth century.
Mourning lockets are a distinct sub-category, identifiable by black-enamel decoration, jet or French-jet construction, inscribed dates of death, and hair of the deceased preserved behind glass. Memorial mourning was a routine domestic practice during Queen Victoria's long mourning period after Prince Albert's death in 1861, and surviving production from the 1860s through the 1880s is correspondingly large.
Materials and decoration
Locket construction varied with budget. Fine goldsmith work in 18-carat or 22-carat gold, with applied gemstones, engraved decoration, and enamel work, served the upper-middle and upper classes. Silver and silver-gilt lockets served middle-class consumption. Pinchbeck (a copper-zinc alloy resembling gold), gilt brass, and gold-filled examples served the broader market. Decoration ranged from chased and engraved florals and rose-gold appliqué to seed-pearl and turquoise applied initials, and to black-enamel inscriptions for mourning examples.
In the trade
Sentimental lockets trade across an enormous price range, from tens of pounds for ordinary gilt-brass examples in worn condition to five and six figures for fine eighteenth-century portrait lockets and royal-provenance examples. For dealers and collectors, the principal value variables are the integrity of the original glass and compartment contents, condition of enamel and engraved decoration, presence of original inscriptions and engraved dates, and the quality of the goldsmith work. Re-glazed lockets and lockets with replaced compartment contents trade at material discounts to original-condition examples; auction-house specialists catalogue these distinctions explicitly.