Mention Lisbon and people tend to think of colorful tiles, delicious egg custard tarts and emotional fado songs. But the Portuguese capital also is home to an attraction not on the typical tourist route: the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum.
The private collection displays about 1,000 items, including Ottoman-era ceramics and textiles, Far Eastern porcelains and lacquers, 15th-century paintings, Greco-Roman sculptures, and works from ancient Egypt.
And one room among those on the sprawling museum campus is dedicated to a collection of wearable items by René Lalique, the early 20th-century French artist famed today for his works in glass. It showcases 77 of his pieces, including 57 that are classified as jewels because they incorporate gems such as diamonds, sapphires, opals, moonstones and aquamarines.
Mr. Gulbenkian obtained nearly all the pieces directly from Mr. Lalique from 1889 to 1927. (Some had been shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1899.)
The two men were friends. No one knows for certain how they met, though one theory has them being introduced by the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was a Lalique client, Luísa Sampaio, 61, the museum’s head of collections, explained in a recent video interview.
Mr. Lalique, who grew up outside Paris, designed jewelry for companies such as Cartier and Boucheron, becoming a master of the Art Nouveau style. He died in Paris in 1945.
Mr. Gulbenkian, who was born in 1869 in what is now Istanbul, made a 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 his career, “Lalique was revolutionary,” Ms. Sampaio said. When it comes to his jewelry, she said, “he doesn’t use many precious stones, normally just small diamonds as details.” He often used enamel to add color and “to make the jewel shine,” she said.
In glass as well as jewels, he worked in three main subjects, she said: the woman, the flora and the fauna. Pieces such as an enameled gold peacock, rock crystal cats and even insects, including scarabs and grasshoppers, can be found in this collection. One necklace depicted a string of grasshoppers in horn, tin plate and baroque pearls.
The collection’s largest jewel has a woman as a dragonfly, an ornament designed to be worn on the chest. At more than nine inches long with an articulated-wing span more than 10 inches wide, it features gold, enamel, chrysoprase, chalcedony, moonstones and diamonds. Mr. Gulbenkian paid 6,000 francs for it in 1903.
Another piece, a cockerel diadem, features gold mesh, blue and green enamel, a three-prong comb made from horn, and an amethyst in the chicken’s mouth. It was bought by the collector in 1904 for 2,800 francs.
In terms of today’s worth, Ms. Sampaio wrote in an email that the estimated values for insurance purposes were confidential, but that “the market would pay more than a million euros for some of the artworks.”
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