Frances Bendixson
Whimsical jeweller who wove gold and silver wire around precious and semi-precious stones
FRANCES BENDIXSON, who has died aged 85, was one of the most original and idiosyncratic jewellers of her time. Her woven rings, collars, brooches, and tiaras, light, witty and romantic, were distinguished by the subtle manner in which she combined stones of different hues.
With little formal training she dispensed with the finicky paraphernalia of gem-setting to work entirely by hand, twisting and weaving gold and silver wire around precious and semiprecious stones to create wholly innovative designs.
If she had a model it was the abstract jewellery designed by the English sculptor and goldsmith Alfred Gilbert. Another influence was the kinetic sculpture of Alexander Calder.
Frances Bendixson began as a jeweller in 1973, when, with two young boys, a journalist husband and a house in Kensington, she felt the need of a home-based career. After attending night classes at the Kingsley School in Glebe Place, Chelsea, she was soon making brooches and other pieces from sheets of polished brass and silver.
A musical aunt received a silhouette of a cello; a garrulous neighbour a teapot; a travelling friend a loping camel train making for a shoulder-pinned oasis. Two years later, after losing her family treasures in a robbery, Frances Bendixson switched styles and began to create the whimsical yet formal jewellery with which she made her name.
In 1978 Annette Reilly, wife of Sir Paul, chairman of the Design Council, commissioned a tiara which she wore when her husband took his seat in the House of Lords.
Over the next 25 years Frances Bendixson made jewellery for clients and friends on both sides of the Atlantic. Being at once gregarious and a brilliant cook, she also entertained them and made them laugh. In consequence, over the years, as many clients became friends as friends became clients.
Rather against the artistic licence of the age, Frances Bendixson, fundamentally conservative, enjoyed and profited from the constraint and discipline of designing jewellery to match the individual concerned.
At home in London, she turned her Victorian drawing room, with its huge 18th-century mahogany bookcase, into a majestic salesroom. Every ring or brooch or collar, each in its idiosyncratic box of plastic, tin or ivory, glittered in candlelight.
In 1985 the Victoria and Albert Museum mounted a retrospective of her work, subsequently purchasing three pieces which are now in its permanent collection. The Goldsmith’s Company in the City, and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design in New York also acquired examples of her work.
An only child, Frances Scamman Parker was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 19 1934, and brought up in nearby Billerica.
Her father, however, lost the family fortune, and separated from his wife Muriel, who went to live at Sanford, Maine, where she worked as a textile designer.
Around the age of seven Frances was struck down by polio, and spent many months in hospital. Her mother became a Christian Scientist, and although Frances never adopted this creed, she did learn to believe in the power of mind over matter.
After attending Sanford High School, she went on to Smith College and a degree in art history. While at Smith her interest in fashion and costume design led to a summer job at Bonwit Teller on Fifth Avenue. As a graduate she worked for the historian Margaret Barr on an art encyclopaedia and so met Margaret’s husband Alfred H Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 1960, by then living in San Francisco, Frances married Terence Bendixson, an English journalist. Moving with him to London, she began adding English friends to her lifelong circle of American ones.
Besides her work in jewellery, Frances Bendixson was an accomplished interior designer, draughtswoman and watercolourist. Whether painting a rocky shoreline on the Hebridean island of Tiree, or sketching a friend on a bicycle, she possessed the knack of capturing the essence of a scene in a few strokes.
At all times Frances Bendixson was ferociously stylish and witty, unlikely to suffer fools unless for some unaccountable reason she loved them.
Latterly she left her large London house for a small cottage in Stroud, where she was near her grandchildren, and delighted to pass on her expertise in Scrabble.
Having coolly overcome cancer three times in four decades, she finally succumbed to the disease with typical absence of fuss.
Terence and Frances Bendixson separated in 1985, and were later divorced, though he remained one of her most attentive friends. He survives her, along with their two sons.