Loretta reports:
Not long ago I read Consuelo Vanderbilt’s The Glitter and the Gold, which had me thinking about Gilded Age fashions. We’ve looked at the wasp waists more than once, mainly in connection with the tight corseting of the Victorian era. Belts often encircled and called attention to those tiny waists, sometimes with beautifully crafted belt buckles, of which the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has a splendid collection.
This gold and garnet buckle is one fine example, dating from about 1899.
The nickel and silver glass paste buckle, with its strange face and the wide open mouth, is something completely different. It’s about ten years later, and looks less Victorian and more Art Nouveau.Can you picture the sort of woman who’d wear one of these? My guess is that it would not be the same woman!
Buckle # 1, by K.K. Faschschule für Edelsteinschleifer, Edelsteingravure, Goldschmeiede und Juweliere, Bohemian (Turneau), founded 1884.
Buckle #2, by Kirschgaessner und Kraft, German (Pforzheim), founded 1902.
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| Marie Kröyer |
Clicking on the image will enlarge it. Clicking on the captions will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.
One of us -- 
5 comments:
They are both so lovely, but the garnet one wins my heart.
How beautiful! The second one is starting to head towards arts and crafts/art noveau in design. More examples of Victorian and Edwardian fashion can be seen on the V & A (Victoria And Albert Museum) collections website
Is that "gem" in the art deco one painted glass?
What's happening with the captchas(sp?) For awhile they happily became readable numbers. now they're back to try try again letter ones. Is that a per blog setting or blogger?
Karen Anne, the description was very brief, and indicates glass. There may be a bit more info at the VMFA site, which I'll try to dig into later. Re captchas--we don't control them. Blogger does. I suspect they switched to deter the spammers, who've been VERY BUSY lately.
If that is glass, I don't think it's painted. It looks more like latticino cane. Latticino is made of several colors of glass twisted together - imagine a candy cane, basically.
You can see the latticino cane a little more clearly in the stripe on the right. While hot and molten, the cane was swirled and pressed onto the background color of glass and then probably pressed into a mold to make the cabochon shape
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