Five thousand drawings. Five thousand archival documents. The working imagination of a jeweler who drew birds and jellyfish and flowers as if they might lift off the page, now placed in the care of a Paris museum.
Tiffany & Co. and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs have signed a four-year partnership to preserve the legacy of Jean Schlumberger. The agreement covers conservation, restoration, and the digitization of more than five thousand original drawings and five thousand archival documents. The house announced it during Paris Fashion Week, inside the museum on the rue de Rivoli. A jeweler who died in 1987 landed back in the middle of the week.
The presentation that marked it took its title from Schlumberger himself. He liked to describe his part in the work as small. I Am Only a Pencil. The display gathered original drawings, archival material, and the finished jewels those drawings became, so that the sketch and the stone sat in the same room.
The salon
Schlumberger joined Tiffany in 1956. Walter Hoving gave him a salon on the mezzanine of the Fifth Avenue store and let him work on his own terms. He favored gold, enamel, and colored stones at a moment when the American trade wanted diamonds in platinum. The drawing came first. The stones followed the line.
His subjects came from the sea and the garden. Birds caught mid-flight. Jellyfish trailing gold tendrils. Flowers that looked grown rather than assembled. He made the Croisillon bangles in paillonné enamel over engraved gold, and Jacqueline Kennedy wore them so often the press named them after her. Bunny Mellon collected him for decades. Diana Vreeland kept his pieces within reach.
He was trusted with the house's most famous stone. In 1961 he set the Tiffany Diamond in a necklace of white diamond ribbons. Years later the yellow stone perched on the Bird on a Rock, the small jeweled bird that became his signature and still turns up in the windows on Fifth Avenue.
A drawing outlasts the stone it describes. Schlumberger understood that. Paris will now keep the proof.
The Splendid EditA living line
The project reaches past the archive. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which holds a deep Schlumberger collection through Bunny Mellon, is lending scientific expertise to the conservation work. The drawings will be studied, stabilized, and photographed page by page. The museum in Paris becomes the place where the full record sits.
Tiffany has kept drawing from him too. Last year the house built the Rope watch on his twisted rope motif, in yellow gold, with a solar movement that runs for eight months in the dark. A line he drew in the 1950s turns up on a wrist in 2025. That is the reason to keep the drawings. A house that holds the archive can keep using it.
The Tiffany & Co. Rope watch, drawn from Jean Schlumberger's rope motif. Courtesy of Tiffany & Co.
The record of a jeweler's hand usually scatters. Drawings go to collectors, to auctions, to drawers that nobody opens. This one stays whole, in one city, held by a museum that has kept the decorative arts for more than a century. The pencil found a place to rest.