Catching the Bug: Archaeology, Entomology and Victorian Jewellery

Insects, and in particular beetles, were a recurring trend in jewellery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Taking its cue from wider European fashions, where imitations of insects and the setting of actual insects into jewellery proved popular, the trend is often discussed in the context of the Victorian obsession with natural history, reaching its height in the 1870s and 1880s. Incorporating shimmering imitations, and even actual insect carapaces, these objects suggest an appreciation of liveliness that survives even after the insect’s transformation into ornament. The Granville Parure, now at the British Museum, is a spectacular if macabre survival of this trend, made up of the bodies of forty-six iridescent green South American weevils gifted to Foreign Secretary George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, to mark the Anglo-Portuguese trade treaty. Granville had the beetles set into a gold tiara, necklace and earrings in the Egyptian style by jewellery firm Phillips Brothers, going back to an earlier appearance of the beetle motif in British jewellery in the 1850s and 1860s, when antique scarabs taken from both Egyptian and Etruscan archaeological sites featured prominently in jewellery made in the archaeological revival style. There, the carved scarab suggested not just the liveliness of the insect it represented, but also the survival of an ancient historical past for the nineteenth-century present. Considering analogous relations between both types of jewellery and the production and dissemination of scientific and historical knowledge, as well as their respective links to empire and British colonial power, this talk explores how beetles – both historical and natural – caught the British imagination.

Speaker bio: Lieske Huits is an historian of nineteenth-century decorative arts and architecture. After undertaking a BA in art history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a research MA at Leiden University, she completed her collaborative PhD in art history at the University of Cambridge and the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she examined debates surrounding style and the phenomenon of historicism in British decorative arts and architecture. She holds the position as University Lecturer of Design and Material Culture at the Center for Arts in Society at Leiden University, where she teaches on undergraduate and graduate programmes for art history and museology. Her research interests include: style and historicism in the decorative arts; the relationship between design and applied arts and the development of scientific and historic knowledge in the long nineteenth century; the role of the periodical press in public discourse surrounding the British design reform movement; and the history of museums and international exhibitions.

Image credit: Phillips Brothers, Lady Granville's Beetle Parure, 1884-1885, die-stamped gold, weevil tissue, 21 x 29.50 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum (2016,8037.1.a-e).

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