In 1963, society jeweller David Webb published a column in the New York Herald Tribune entitled “Why Not Hang Gems?”.
“Jewellery, though more personal than paintings, should be treated as great works of art, which they certainly are,” Webb wrote. “Collections of jewellery should be exhibited to the public like other great works of art. Not everyone can own one or more of the world’s great paintings – nor can they own great jewellery – but they can and do appreciate them”.
Tragically, Webb died of pancreatic cancer in 1975 at the age of 50, but the company he founded has continued to produce his designs thanks to the rich archive of drawings he left behind. Despite Webb’s best efforts, however, the argument implicit in every aspect of his work – that jewellery is no different from art – is still up for debate. Author and jewellery historian Ruth Peltason sets out to settle it.
In The Art of David Webb: Jewellery and Culture, a sumptuous coffee-table book published by Rizzoli in September, Peltason makes a compelling case for Webb’s original thesis.
“It’s not that David Webb is the only jeweller whose work approaches art with a capital A, but I happen to be the girl driving the car, and that car is David Webb,” Peltason tells Robb Report. “He was self-taught and didn’t have the guardrails that most of us learn in college.
“Certain people have bon gout – good taste,” she adds. “And he had an instinct for good design. I don’t think he really cared about wearability – it didn’t matter to him. A painter doesn’t design for the size of your house, a photographer doesn’t care what colour your couch is. The true couturier designs to create the fullest expression of who they are.
“David Webb would say, ‘This is my studio and I’m going to design whatever I want. So when you step back and look at it that way, you get away from jewellery as adornment or accessory and you see it as art.”
A shortcut to this understanding lies in Peltason’s 256-page tome, which is packed with images by photographer Ilan Rubin of Webb’s colourful, animal-inspired and unapologetically maximalist jewels, paired with artworks that may have inspired them.
In the case of the remarkable coiled dragon brooch on page 72, there is little doubt that Webb drew inspiration for the piece, centred on a spectacularly carved emerald, from a Scythian pommel in the shape of a coiled animal that appeared in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in late 1959.
“I had read something Webb had said about Scythian art, checked the dates of the exhibition, and my God, it was there,” says Peltason. “I found the exhibition catalogue.
“I think art across the centuries speaks to each other,” she adds.
The evidence threaded throughout the book is utterly compelling, from the coral and emerald chrysanthemum brooch Webb made in 1966 (page 22) to the Japanese woodblock print Chrysanthemums and Horseflies by Katsushika Hokusai (c. 1833-34), which appears opposite; to the rubellite and ridged coral ring that Webb’s studio made in 2021 (page 221), with an orange and fuschia colour scheme that mirrors a 1947 drawing by Henri Matisse, Palmette, shown on the previous page.
But that’s not all. You look at the Christian Dior dress in my book next to the diamond earring, and suddenly you say, ‘My God, there it is,'” says Peltason, referring to the couturier’s Eugénie dress on page 186, “a generous cascade of ever-widening layers of pink nylon lace,” she writes in the book, and the 2018 diamond and platinum Cosmo earrings that seem to be in conversation with it.
To see the connections, “you have to let yourself go, be less of a scientist and more of a poet,” says Peltason. “You have to have a confident eye, because David Webb had a confident eye. To talk about Webb is to be prepared to follow his example and look hard and look far.
Peltason could just as easily be talking about her own deep dive into Webb’s rich history, which she first explored in 2010 when she was commissioned to write the definitive history of the jeweller by the company’s new owners, estate jewellers Sima Ghadamian, Mark Emanuel and Robert Saidian.
The result, David Webb: The Quintessential American Jeweler, was published in 2013 and cemented his place in the pantheon of the 20th century’s finest jewellers.
“I think his greatest legacy is that he is the quintessential American designer,” says Peltason. “When I named the book, I wasn’t trying to name the book, I was trying to describe him. I love American design because it comes from everywhere. Webb gives us a very curated look at design through the millennia and comes up with something that feels modern. That’s not so easy.
