An online exhibition to visit!

An unprecedented collaboration between the National Library of France and the School of Jewelry Arts

The online exhibition “Jewelry and Literature” was inaugurated a few days ago on one of the digital portals of the National Library of France, a portal called Essentiels and which is the virtual and educational platform of the BNF. For the first time, the BNF is joining forces with the School of Jewelry Arts with the support of Van Cleef & Arpels to offer exclusive content that highlights the links between literature and jewelry. Because if authors are often inspired by jewelry to write their texts, jewelers were also influenced by literary works and the whole project of this work consists of clarifying these particular relationships.

Famous Jewelry Stories and Lesser Known Stories

First of all, we can say that this project was supervised by Charline Coupeau, who has a doctorate in art history and a researcher in the history of jewelry and jewelry heritage. And she surrounded herself with several contributors to work on the influence of jewelry on literature and vice versa as well as on the capacity of jewelry to provoke meetings between authors and jewelers.

We find both very famous jewelry stories. I am thinking in particular of a cartoon from the exhibition which tells the story of the queen’s very famous necklace, a necklace of a hundred pearls, 674 diamonds and 2842 carats, which was an order from King Louis his mistress Madame du Barry. And which is a necklace which had been stolen and which had nourished the imagination of many authors. Among them, we think of Alexandre Dumas and his novel simply called “The Queen’s Necklace” or even Maurice Leblanc who depicts Arsène Lupine with this jewel in his hands…

And then there are subjects that are a little less expected, such as an article that questions the representation of jewelry in Franco-Belgian comics for example or the story of the ring we call “Lou’s ring” and which is a ring which was made in 1915 on the war front by Apollinaire for Louise de Coligny-Chatillon. And we see this ring in a photo on the site, it’s still quite incredible!

It is truly an exhibition which displays jewels and texts from all periods: We can also discover writing treasures in Mesopotamia which mix mythical stories and stories of jewelry as well as texts on the erotic dimension of stones in the Age of Enlightenment.

Unpublished illustrations from the collections of national and international museums

When possible, yes! In total, there are 150 images on the site. There are obviously photographs but there are also illustrations, drawings, engravings, prints and paintings which come from the collections of the National Library of France but also from other national and international museum institutions. And I talk a lot about images because they are jewels that we are not used to seeing (Balzac’s cane for example or the thick ones of academicians) but there is obviously an immense corpus of texts to read.

An exhibition for young and old

Essentials is above all an educational platform, so this exhibition has been designed for everyone. And it is thanks to stories that the exhibition is aimed at children. In particular, there are nine recordings of tales to listen to which tell stories about jewelry from China to Iran via Ethiopia or Japan.

And I also add that there is a real diversity of formats offered. In addition to explanatory videos, illustrations, texts and stories, we also find interviews like that of Rosalie Varda, the daughter of Jacques Demy who presents the jewels from the film Peau d’âne directed by her father and she shows in particular the rings tried on by the princesses at the end of the film – we see extracts from the musical at the same time when she speaks!

To discover the “literature and jewelry” project:

You can follow this link.