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Jewelry and Metal Craft Work by Janet Payne Bowles

DATES June 21, 1927 through 1927 (date unknown)
ORGANIZING DEPARTMENT Decorative Arts
There are currently no digitized images of this exhibition. If images are needed, contact archives.research@brooklynmuseum.org.
  • July 29, 1927 The Brooklyn Museum has augmented its summer exhibition with the addition of an exhibition of jewelry and metal craft work by Janet Payne Bowles. Mrs. Bowles is well known for her work for ecclesiastical purposes and for private connoisseurs and collectors. In her reliquaries, chalices, crosses, pectorals, boxes, spoons, rings and necklaces she has made use of curious designs in her effort to express the universal and the eternal and her work is characterized by the use of many strange animal forms. She does not draw her designs on paper but the forms are evolved "by the metals themselves" as she works. She says that her greatest inspiration has been from early Greek retrousse and from Celtic and Norse designs. One of her chief patrons was the late J. P. Morgan, who gave her full access to his library on the art of jewelry and she has also fulfilled special cornmissions for Mr. Spencer Trask, the late John W. Alexander, Miss Maude Adams, Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke and Senor I. Bossilini. Among the many prized Mrs. Bowles has received are the Panama-Pacific Exhibition 1915, the Paris International Jewelers' Prize 1913, the Bossilini Prize (International) at Florence 1917, the Paris and London Goldsmiths' and Silversmiths' Prize (in Paris) 1918, the Spencer Trask Prize for American Craftsmen.

    Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1916 - 1930. 1927, 060.
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