The Glittering Legacy of Cartier – A Family Story Unearthed in a Cellar

When Francesca Cartier Brickell went looking for a bottle of champagne in her grandfather’s cellar on his 90th birthday, she found something else. Under decades of dust sat a forgotten trunk full of letters: a century of family correspondence about Cartier.

Among them was a letter from 1915, written by Pierre Cartier to his brother Jacques. “You know from experience that my two brothers mean everything to me… It’s together that we developed our house and spread its fame to the four corners of the globe.” Jacques was recovering from tuberculosis, and Pierre was pleading with him not to go back to the Front in the First World War. The family firm needed all three brothers alive and together.

The V&A Museum’s Cartier exhibition

That letter will be shown for the first time at the V&A Museum’s Cartier exhibition, the first major show of the house’s work in three decades. It opens on 12 April 2025, and it gives overdue recognition to Cartier London, the branch that Jacques Cartier built.

The three brothers, Louis, Pierre and Jacques, made their plan as children in the late 19th century, on their bedroom floor. Louis would take Paris. Pierre would take America. Jacques, the youngest and the thoughtful one, would have Britain and India. By the early 20th century they had done it.

The video below is my own. It is about my vintage Les Must de Cartier leather bag, and how to tell a real one from a fake.

Cartier London and Edward VII

Cartier London opened in 1902 at the request of Edward VII, who wanted his coronation guests to be able to buy their tiaras without crossing the Channel. By 1909 Jacques had moved the business to 175 New Bond Street, the address it still has today. Duchesses, American heiresses and maharajas all came to it.

Paris often overshadowed it, but Cartier London had an identity of its own. In 1921 it opened English Art Works, which soon became the finest jewellery workshop in the country. The exhibition shows what came out of it: art deco tiaras, Egyptian-inspired brooches, gem-set birds and the many-coloured tutti frutti pieces.

Jacques Cartier was an artist and a traveller as well as a businessman, and he was in love with a woman named Nelly Harjes. Her father disapproved and thought Jacques socially unworthy. So Jacques was set a test: prove your love by not contacting Nelly for a whole year. He did exactly that. On day 366 he came back, vowing never to touch a cent of her fortune, and he never did.

The amethyst brooch

Their story survives in an amethyst brooch that Jacques designed. Nelly’s birthstone is at the centre, with four diamonds around it, one for each of their children, framed in sapphire, his own birthstone. It will be on display at the exhibition.

Jacques took to England. He and Nelly settled in Dorking, among clients and friends: Isadora Duncan, Vita Sackville-West and the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith. Asquith’s wife, Margot, later wrote of him:

Jewellers are not always great artists… but M Jacques Cartier was a wonderful friend. Courteous, kind, unself-seeking: a true ambassador between the France he loved and the England he admired.

Jacques believed in training British craftsmen instead of bringing them over from Paris, even when it cost more. In the 1930s, as feeling against foreigners rose, Queen Mary made a very public visit to Cartier London to draw attention to its local workforce. She left with a pair of earrings, at a royal discount.

India

Jacques first went to India in 1911, and the trip was a comedy of errors: no car, only a donkey, and the wrong stock. But those early mistakes led to close ties with Indian royalty, whose commissions kept the house going through Europe’s financial troubles.

His masterpiece was a necklace for his friend Ranji, the Maharaja of Nawanagar, made with some of the rarest diamonds in the world. That necklace is lost. The exhibition shows the Maharaja of Patiala’s enormous necklace, which was originally set with nearly 3,000 diamonds.

The colours of India, and the panthers he saw there, gave Jacques new ideas, and his travel sketches turned into jewellery. Colour came into Cartier’s work. The tutti frutti style, with its carved rubies, emeralds and sapphires, was born. One of the stars of the exhibition is a 1928 bandeau that comes apart into two bracelets, once owned by Lady Mountbatten, Vicereine of India.

The Crash watch

His son, Jean-Jacques Cartier, carried it on and went further. He gave us the Crash watch. Legend says its shape came from a car accident. It came from a playful kink put into the popular Oval design. It was too much for its time, and the actor Stewart Granger returned his. Now collectors pay millions for one.

Jean-Jacques also worked on royal commissions. Queen Elizabeth II’s pink Williamson diamond flower brooch is on show, and so is the gem-set stag’s head he designed for Belgian royalty, beside the original sketches.

Cartier London was a family, quite literally. Generations of designers and goldsmiths worked side by side. They washed gold dust out of their hair in the workshop sinks, took mental health days before setting fragile Mughal emeralds, and told stories of Elizabeth Taylor clutching her 69-carat ring.

Cartier: Design, Craftsmanship, and the Global Brand will run at the V&A Museum, London, from 12 April to 16 November 2025. Francesca Cartier Brickell will speak on Cartier London on 19 June.