The forgotten great of a golden era
How jeweller-watchmaker Jacob Dreicer and his more celebrated rivals made horological history. By and
Gilded Age steel baron Andrew Carnegie famously remarked, “A man who dies rich, dies disgraced.” And no one worked harder to help Carnegie and his fellow industrial tycoons avoid that fate than men such as Herman Marcus, Louis Tiffany, Pierre Cartier and Jacob Dreicer – the great New York jewellers of the early 20th century.
Unlike Britain in the same era, America offered extraordinary class mobility, but this came at a price. Provided it was spent in the right way, money allowed nouveau riche families like the Carnegies to move in the same social circles as the old-money Astors and Vanderbilts.
Spending money in the ‘right way’ meant funding great public institutions – museums, libraries, symphony halls and opera houses. The extraordinary cultural wealth of modern-day New York is a testament to the grand scale of this high-stakes battle for social acceptance.
And, just like today, a key part of community philanthropy is the gala: an opportunity to claim credit for your largesse and put your wealth on very public display.
So when Miranda Kerr wore a fabulous Bulgari diamond collier to this year’s Met Gala, she was following the tradition of socialite Caroline Astor, who once wore a legendary diamond ‘stomacher’ (purportedly once owned by Marie Antoinette) and matching tiara to a Metropolitan Opera Ball more than a century before.
Given the scale of the consumption of fine gems during this period, competition among the great jewellery houses was predictably fierce, with the spirit of fair play not always observed. Marcus & Co and Tiffany & Co, which catered to many of the same clients, often mirrored each other’s designs (see box-out, below right). Both firms had a fondness for white stones, platinum and elaborate settings; it is sometimes hard to tell their creations apart.
However, there was no greater rivalry among New York jewellers than between Dreicer & Co and Cartier. Jacob Dreicer was arguably the most talented – and shrewd – jeweller ever to tread the cement sidewalks of New York’s Diamond District.
His first shop was located close to Delmonico’s steakhouse, where the jeweller could frequently be found offering exquisite pearls – a Dreicer speciality – over the dinner table. That renowned connoisseur of rare pearls, JP Morgan, was doubtless a Dreicer customer.
Morgan was, in fact, a prodigious consumer of jewellery, including for himself. His collection of watches, catalogued by GC Williamson in 1912, may well have been the greatest ever assembled in America. As a yachtsman, he had a special fondness for high-grade chronometers. He presented gold pocket watches to incoming directors, a tradition that began in 1891 with his son, JP Morgan Jr. If Morgan was indeed a loyal Dreicer client, watches would have inevitably formed a key battleground in the intense competition between Cartier and Dreicer.
Cartier, of course, has a legendary watchmaking tradition. The Santos-dumont, designed by Louis Cartier in 1904 for the great Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-dumont, has a solid claim to being the first modern men’s wristwatch. The renowned Cartier Tonneau followed a couple of years later, and the iconic Tank about 10 years after that. These early watches typically contain movements by Cartier’s longtime collaborator Edmond Jaeger.
Dreicer duplicated many of these designs. And, like the Cartiers, Dreicer’s watches would often feature movements from Jaeger. As with Marcus and Tiffany, it was easy to confuse Dreicer’s pieces for Cartier – and vice versa.
But Dreicer was no mere copycat. His watch designs, many of which incorporated geometric forms executed in exotic and unexpected materials such as jade, wood or carnelian, were every bit a match for the always novel and tasteful pieces that emerged from Cartier’s workshops.
While Marcus and Tiffany hewed to a white-on-white palette, Dreicer and Cartier produced fantasy watches that captured the colour and dynamism of emerging European expressionism, fused to the simplicity and elegance of cubism.
This golden age of New York watchmaking came to a sudden end in the mid-1920s, following the deaths of Jacob Dreicer and his son and heir apparent, Michael. The firm was liquidated and shut down in 1927, with most of its stock purchased, rather fittingly, by Cartier.
Fortunately, a monument stands to Dreicer’s colourful contributions to New York’s bygone jewellery scene. On the corner of 39th Street and 5th Avenue, the small but elegant Dreicer building, now bereft of its legendary glass and mahogany vitrines, competes for sunshine with the skyscrapers that have grown up around it. Sadly, Lady Astor’s Rolls-royce is no longer parked outside on rainy Manhattan afternoons.