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A wealthy businessman’s purchases are accompanied by a tiara set with precious stones and a giant dragonfly brooch.
By Susanne Fowler
Report from Lisbon
When other people think of Lisbon, they tend to think of colorful tiles, delicious egg cream cakes, and heartwarming fados. But the Portuguese capital is also home to a charm not found on the typical tourist route: the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. .
The collection features around 1,000 objects, including ceramics and textiles from the Ottoman era, porcelain and lacquers from the Far East, 15th-century paintings, Greco-Roman sculptures and works from ancient Egypt.
And one of the rooms on the museum’s sprawling campus is dedicated to a collection of portable items by René Lalique, the early 20th-century French artist known for his glass works. It features 77 of her pieces, 57 of which are classified as jewelry because they incorporate gemstones such as diamonds, sapphires, opals, moonstones, and aquamarines.
Mr. Gulbenkian received almost all of Mr. Gulbenkian’s Lalique portions from 1889 to 1927 (some were exhibited at the 1899 Paris Exposition Universelle).
The two men were friends. No one knows for sure how they met, one theory is that they were brought through actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was a consumer of Lalique’s, explained Luísa Sampaio, 61, the museum’s head of collections, in a recent video interview.
Mr. Lalique, who grew up on the outskirts of Paris, designed jewelry for companies such as Cartier and Boucheron, becoming a master of the Art Nouveau style. He died in Paris in 1945.
Gulbenkian, born in 1869 in present-day Istanbul, made his fortune as an engineer and businessman in the oil sector. He moved to Portugal during World War II and died in Lisbon in 1955.
Throughout her career, “Lalique has been an innovator,” Sampaio said. When it comes to her jewelry, she says, “she doesn’t use a lot of gemstones, usually just small diamonds as details. “She used teeth to add color and “make the jewelry shine,” she says.
In both glass and jewelry, she worked on 3 main themes, she says: women, flora and fauna. In this collection you can discover pieces such as a peacock in enamelled gold, rock crystal cats and insects, beetles and grasshoppers. A necklace depicted a string of lobsters made of horn, pewter, and baroque beads.
The largest piece of jewelry in the collection features a dragonfly shape, an ornament designed to be worn on the chest. It measures more than nine inches long and has a jointed wingspan more than 10 inches wide, and features gold, enamel, chrysoprase, chalcedony, moonstones, and diamonds. Gulbenkian paid 6,000 francs for it in 1903.
Another piece, a chicken tiara, features gold mesh, blue and green enamel, a three-clawed horn comb, and an amethyst in the chicken’s mouth. It was acquired through the collector in 1904 for 2,800 francs.
As for the existing value, Sampaio wrote in an email that the estimated values for the insurance were confidential, but that “the market would pay more than a million euros for some works of art. “
Susanne Fowler is the former editor-in-chief of the London and Paris bureaus of The New York Times. Learn more about Susanne Fowler
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