Diamond brooch, Early 20th Century

Crescent, star and sunburst brooches lavishly set with diamonds were in great favour in the last decades of the 19^th century. The fashion for decorating lockets, pendants and bracelet centres with pearl or diamond encrusted star motifs started in the early 1860s and developed in a craze that required fashionable ladies to wear star-shaped ornaments pinned on their corsages or secured to their hairstyles. The generally flat and simple design of the early examples gradually evolved into more elaborate and three-dimensional twelve or sixteen pointed creations in the 1880s. By this date, brooches in the shape of crescents, sun-in-splendour, sunbursts and rising suns, mainly set with diamonds but occasionally decorated with pearls and coloured gems, were sharing the popularity of  stars in the fashionable circles. The spectacular crescent brooch illustrated on these pages is remarkable for its bold and imposing design, its exceptional size and the lavish use of beautifully matched and graduated diamonds.