New Old Stock

ur search for antique jewellery takes us to places all over the world, to antique markets in London and auctions in Lisbon as well as to New York or Hong Kong. Sometimes, however, the jewellery finds its way to us. Like a few years ago, when we received a call and someone made us a unique offer, out of the blue: the caller had found a suitcase with jewellery by Theodor Fahrner in her attic. Would we be interested?

Theodor Fahrner

Today, the name “Fahrner Schmuck” is synonymous with high-quality, factory-made jewellery of the Art Nouveau and - above all - Art Déco periods. However, the history of the company began even earlier, in 1855, in Pforzheim.¹

Pforzheim, on the northern edge of Germany’s Black Forest, was the centre of the European jewellery production in the late 19th century. At times, more than 30,000 people across several hundred factories created jewellery. However, the factories did not usually sell their products under their own name, and for a long time did not even sign them. Wholesalers distributed the pieces to jewellers, and no customer knew who had originally made the jewellery. As a result, it is often no longer possible today to attribute 19th century Pforzheim-made jewellery to any particular producer.²

The Seeger & Fahrner ring factory, founded in 1855, was one of these makers. Little is known about the company’s early years and for a long time its products did not differ from those of the other Pforzheim companies. This all changed with Theodor Fahrner (1859-1919), who took over the company in 1883 and sought a way to break away from the competition with the other manufacturers.

In addition to the production of silverware³ and the inexpensive rolled gold (‘doublé’) jewellery that was commonly made in Pforzheim, and which guaranteed the company a secure turnover, he developed a new range of so-called “artist’s jewellery” in the modern Art Nouveau style in the years shortly before 1900. Fahrner skilfully recruited well-known designers such as Joseph Maria Olbrich, Ludwig Habich and Franz Boeres, who are less well-known today but were highly respected at the time.⁴

Success came quickly. At the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, Fahrner’s work based on designs by Max Joseph Gradl was honoured with a silver medal.⁵ The brooches based on designs by Patriz Huber “were sold by the thousands, not only in Germany but also in Paris and elsewhere abroad”.⁶ In contrast to Lalique in Paris, for instance, Fahrner did not produce precious individual pieces, but jewellery in the medium price range for a large audience, in large editions, made of silver and using mechanical production techniques.

The Art Déco Era

Theodor Fahrner died in 1919 and Gustav Braendle took over the company at the end of the year.¹¹ The company had around 50 employees at this time. This made it a rather small company in the panorama of the Pforzheim jewellery industry. The chain factory of Kolman & Jourdan, for example, employed 1700 people in 1913.¹² The company’s real capital, however, was the recognition of its name and brand.

From around 1906 onwards, Theodor Fahrner increasingly refrained from inviting well-known artists and instead worked with local designers from Pforzheim. Their names no longer appeared in the advertisements or on the backs of the jewellery. Instead, the “Fahrner Jewellery” brand alone was brought to the attention of customers.¹³

For the “Lady of Taste“

Braendle’s designs clearly break with the formal language of earlier Fahrner jewellery. They were modelled after Art Déco designs from Paris; German Art Nouveau no longer played a role on the European market. However, the way in which the company produced its jewellery had hardly changed. Enamel, for example, can already be found in the first designs of the artist’s jewellery (see the illustration of the necklace above). The company probably had a separate department for this.¹⁷

In addition, Theodor Fahrner had already produced mainly in silver before the First World War. In the economically strained 1920s, it was once again the material of the hour, as it enabled the majority of women buyers to follow the radically changing jewellery fashion in the first place.

In the 19th century, the designs of inexpensive and precious jewellery had often been the same, only the former were sometimes made of gold-plated brass and the latter of gold and platinum. Contemporary catalogues regularly offered different versions of more or less the same designs at different prices.¹⁸

However, from the turn of the century onwards (for example with Theodor Fahrner), and especially in the 1920s, something new emerged. For the first time, jewellery was made from cheaper materials that were not copies of precious jewels, but valued in their own right. This costume jewellery, in the literal sense of the word, would never have been made from gold. It was no longer intended to testify to the status and wealth of its wearer but, in the modern, democratic spirit of the time, to express her taste, education and personality, beyond the barriers of class.¹⁹

Unlike its major competitors, Henkel & Grossé in Pforzheim or Jakob Bengel in Idar-Oberstein, who favoured base materials such as Bakelite and gold-plated brass, Braendle remained faithful to silver.²⁰ Fahrner jewellery could thus be advertised as “genuine” and “high-quality“, which enabled customers to wear it to prestigious evening events.²¹ Braendle thus occupied a lucrative niche in the market.

Around 1930, at the height of its success, the company employed around 300 people and sold its jewellery worldwide.²²

New Old Stock

More than 40 years after the dissolution of the company, we received a suitcase full of Fahrner jewellery. It contained more than 200 individual pieces, many in the elegant designs of the 1950s. Others were obviously designed later, some brooches showed the design language of the 1960s, and there were even some rare pieces from a 1970s series. But when were they created? And for what purpose?

Almost all pieces of jewellery bore at least one small tag, many of which celebrated the company’s 100th anniversary in 1950. Although the company was actually founded in 1855, as can be seen from old adverts, the founding date in 1950 had apparently been brought forward by 5 years. All of these labels had a model number and a price in DM handwritten on the back.

We suspect that it was a travelling salesman’s sample case, which had been stowed away after the demise of the company and had not been opened since. All the pieces were unworn and their large number led us to assume that it represented the company’s entire programme in the 1970s.