Puzzling Evidence: Helen Burton, Miriam Haskell, and Chinese Beads in 1930s-40s Fashion Jewelry

Recently I obtained a rather sad old 1930s necklace featuring Chinese beads. It had evidently Seen Life stuffed into boxes, drawers and thrift shops and had some problems.

Old cinnabar lacquer beads from the 1930s have an unfortunate composition that melts under warmth, frequently with a result as in this necklace – blobby distorted beads, bits of cinnabar melted and glued onto other beads.

So, the beads required some cleaning and repair.  Hot water to soften the cinnabar and get it unstuck from other beads, vinegar to remove spots of verdigris, re-shaping the crushed filigree beads back to round, and making a new beaded bead to replace the fragile old bead strung on fine silk over a rag core. *

A similar triple strand necklace from Beads With A Past is featured in a blog post I did several years ago about this type of necklace.  The stone beads typically include carnelian, chalcedony, amethyst, rose quartz, rock crystal, lapis (or dyed jasper), turquoise, jade, and possibly steatite and serpentine.

https://www.beadiste.com/2015/07/puzzling-evidence-deco-chinese-charm.html

The Beads With A Past necklace appears to be strung on cord with bead tips used to attach the strands to the clasp.  Whether this is the original stringing or a professional restringing is unknown.  On my necklace, the replacement stringing materials of monofilament and flex wire beading lines were likely chosen as they can be used without needles.  The mis-drilled holes on many of the stone beads possibly also encouraged the use of stiff monofilament and beading wire instead of trying to coax fabric cords through tiny holes with fragile beading needles.  Unfortunately, the amateur re-stringers did not know how to fasten monofilament and flex wire cable to the clasp ends, so the clasp attachments were a loose mess of clumsy knots. One half of the clasp was also accidentally attached upside down.  I used a doubled 10-pound test Fireline polyethylene braid, size 12 beading needle, and French wire (bullion) to cover the line at the clasp attachment, as the French wire seemed to coordinate best with the twisted wire work on the clasp.  Also because I really hate crimp beads and bead tips.

In the Beads With A Past necklace, small corrugated brass beads can be seen between the larger beads.  These small beads are important in a necklace that is not knotted, as they provide pivot points for flexibility and reducing snapping strain on the cord.  Many of these little beads were missing on my necklace, possibly having rolled off to the usual unfindable crevices when the strands broke, so I decided to not re-use the ones that were left, substituting similar 3mm sized Czech glass beads in a swirled amber “cornelian” glass.  Brass beads are verdigris bait, so using glass eliminates that danger as well.  As the original composition featured carved cinnabar beads, I substituted two 1970s cinnabar beads of superior manufacture with a sturdier lacquer, albeit smaller size.

Was amused that both I and the older designer of the Beads With A Past necklace came to the same obvious conclusion about positioning the large round cloisonne bead and the woven silver bead – I didn’t notice this until after I pulled the photos from my archive.

Necklace designers will likely observe my composition is less symmetrically structured than the Beads With A Past necklace.  For example, the large cloisonne ovals could have been positioned a bit lower and across from one another, and the cinnabar on opposite sides instead of on the same side.  Were I even more obsessive I’d restring the two strands, but instead my response is “Too damn bad.”  Let us pretend that these offenses against symmetry add drama and encourage the eye to move around the design.

Not all the beads are Chinese.  The filigree beads are of Western manufacture. Similar filigrees can be seen on pages 35-37 in the Guyot Brothers of Rhode Island filigree catalog online.  https://www.salvadoretool.com/pages/cfGuyotCatalog.cfm

The tooled brass clasp reminded me of the brass work on a series of belts and necklaces featuring Chinese cloisonne beads.  Helen Burton? Miriam Haskell? Chinese brass work, or Rhode Island?  Chinese workshops were quite expert and skilled at tooled, stamped, and engraved brass bric-a-brac, so I lean toward Chinese origin & Helen Burton as supplier to the West.

Of interest are the facts that in 1937 Helen Burton visited Rhode Island, then a costume jewelry manufacturing mecca, to sell a shipment of her Chinese merchandise. 

https://www.beadiste.com/2014/02/puzzling-evidence-chinese-cloisonne.html

Miriam Haskell also used Guyot Brothers filigrees in her designs.  I continue to wonder if there was some connection between Helen Burton and the appearance of Chinese cloisonne, cinnabar, and other beads in this 1930s-40s charm jewelry, and particularly an effect upon the Miriam Haskell workshop. These “Chinese” designs have never appeared in any of the costume jewelry books or online forums I’ve consulted.  There is only a passing reference on page 29 of Deanna Farneti Cera’s book, “The Jewels of Miriam Haskell:”

“Political events also influenced designers. Out of sympathy for Chinese and Greek people who were fighting Japan and Italy, the allies of Nazi Germany, they turned to those antique cultures for inspiration.” 

I suspect interest in “Chinese” fashion jewelry began in the late 1930s, when Japan was invading Manchuria, and then China itself in 1937, starting WWII in Asia. The exploits of Claire Chennault and his Flying Tigers, Generals Joseph Stillwell and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Mao and his Red Army, and the infamous Japanese “Rape of Nanking” were in the news.  Nonetheless, no example of this style of costume jewelry with Asian elements attributed to Haskell is illustrated in the Cera book, or anywhere else, it seems.  Cera provides only one photo of a pair of earrings, ironically containing no Chinese components at all, with a caption reading,

“Earrings in the shape of Chinese lanterns Frank Hess, c1941. Filigree and gilded metal stampings, rhinestones, rondelles and pate de verre beads.  Unsigned.  Private collection. In these earrings the colours of the American flag (red, white and blue) and the Chinese lantern design both represent messages of encouragement and solidarity (at this time China was fighting against Japan).”

*For those curious about how the beaded bead was made, I did a sketch of the pattern derived from examination of the old bead.  This cross weaving technique shows up often in Chinese beads woven from tiny coral beads.