posted 09-08-2009 02:24 PM            

I've never seen this before - an actual photo transferred to the dust cover of a gold watch case. I'm wondering how this was done and why this technique doesn't appear on silver presentation items, etc. Seems Victorians would have loved this.

posted 09-15-2009 09:28 AM            

The watch was made by the Tremont Watch Company, but retailed by Tiffany, and still in its original presentation case. The woman on the watch case, Julia Shanley, was the wife of the original owner, who received the watch from his parents, whose pictures are on the dial.

posted 09-16-2009 05:22 PM            

And an 1867 ad for a retailer assuring customers that, "Orders sent by mail will receive prompt attention, and those sending can confidently rely on no other being substituted.":

posted 09-16-2009 11:31 PM            

However, horse hair which was used some in nineteenth century jewelry was entirely acceptable simply because it was not human.

posted 09-17-2009 01:29 PM            

The New American Cyclopedia of 1860 states, concerning imported hair, "Besides its use for the head, it has of late years been employed as a material for delicate articles of jewelry, being plaited into suitable forms for ornamental pins, ear rings, &c.". An 1867 U.S. report on a Paris Exposition notes regarding finished products of the French wholesale hair trade, "All the wigs, plaits, &c., are made by women, as well as the watch-chains, bracelets, and other fancy articles in hair.". Will post a link to Mark Campbell's 1867 book on hair-work (fascinating to those interested in the subject), on page 262 he states, concerning imported hair, "...not a small amount is used in the manufacture of hair jewelry, and other such articles as are worn for ornaments.". The ad posted previously mentions selling at both wholesale and retail, and offering to the furnish the braids separately, without any mention of using hair provided by a customer (though his stores surely offered the option). Self-Instructor in the Art of Hair Work

The memories are becoming a bit fuzzy, but I did some research on hair jewelry for a friend years ago, and if I recall correctly, some of the other information I found included accounts of 18th century Scandinavian girls and women making plaited-hair jewelry to sell at fairs, and of some late 18th century English jewelry makers working in plaited hair. Unable to locate my notes at the moment though.....

Here's notation of an 1853 Silver Medal awarded to Samuel T. Crosby by the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association:

posted 09-20-2009 09:25 AM            

It really casts an interesting light on the whole idea that people would by jewelry made of hair simply for its beauty of workmanship rather than its personal association. It seems that we can't assume anything unless we have a family history that accompanies a piece, naming the owner of the hair. I suppose one might want to assume that in the case of the Shanley watch chain, such an intimate thing would come from an intimate source. But, then, why? It is a piece of virtuoso hair braiding, with conventional religious motifs that would have meant the same to any Christian. Why couldn't Mrs. Shanley have purchased this bit of handcraft in the 1880s for her new husband as a token of her love--not a piece of her hair?

posted 09-20-2009 01:01 PM            

I think you have to consider who would have commissioned the jewelry and how easy or difficult it would be to make from different sorts of hair.

It's true that most hair jewelry I've seen is made of hair in the middle of the brown range. Could that be because most Americans with the money to commission hair jewelry had hair in the middle of the brown range during the period when it was popular? Immigrants from southern Europe might have black hair but less money to spend on hair jewelry (and I've seen very, very dark brown hair jewelry); immigrants from Ireland and Scandinavia might have red or blond hair but (again) less money--and, again, those colors aren't entirely absent. It might be interesting to compare hair jewelry colors to hair colors in contemporary portraits.

Of course, not all the hair jewelry is American. I've seen photos of hair jewelry identified as English and French and Scandinavian in the colors common in those places. Which could just mean that they used locally gathered hair from strangers, of course.

As for gray and white hair, there's no such thing as gray hair. Gray hair is just a mixture of colored hairs and white hairs. So if you take a lock of hair from the head of a gray haired person, you can choose the brown (or red or black or whatever) hairs or the white hairs or a combo. I actually once made a palette-worked hair plaque, a basket of flowers, out of hair from my six best college friends (plus me) for the birthday of one of six friends. Her hair had gone gray by then, but I separated it into white, which I used for some part of the basket, and brown, which I used for one of the flowers. Hairwork requires you to handle the stuff hair by hair, so it's no harder to separate the white from the brown.

Tableworked hair--the woven stuff--requires long locks. I wonder whether the common gifts of tableworked hair marked events that took place earlier in the life of the person with the hair in question. A newly engaged girl giving her fiance a watch chain, for example. Young hair tends to be longer and stronger.

Palette-worked hair jewelry (like the plaque in the hair bracelet discussed here: Help me identify this trade card? ) can be done with much shorter hair. And the pictures come out better with contrasting colors. So if it's all made with one color hair or hair in very close but not identical colors, that suggest to me that the point might be the sentimental value of the hair, not the artistry of the craft.

In the bracelet I linked to above, the braids of hair are all dark brown, but one is slightly lighter than the other two. If they'd been choosing hair by color rather than origin, I think they would have matched it better or made it more contrasting. That makes me think it's probably the hair of people known to the bracelet owner, perhaps family members. Same goes for a pair of tableworked earrings I have--if you look really, really closely you can see they're made of two different colors, with a contrasting colored drop in the middle of each earring, but not contrasting enough to be a smart design choice.

Maybe I'll take some photos of my hairwork pieces later on to show what I mean.

A friend of mine, a Chinese woman who lives in America, recently went home to visit her family and came back with short hair. "Nice haircut," I said. She laughed and told me she'd sold her hair. As she was walking down the street in Beijing someone offered to buy her hair. She decided she wanted a haircut anyway, so she took the hair buyer up on it. (Just an irrelevant anecdote on a lazy Sunday.)

posted 09-21-2009 09:45 AM            

It would make sense that most hair jewelry, like wigs of the era, would have been made from hair purchased from those women who had such beautiful hair. A famous short story comes to mind - O. Henry's "Gift of the Magi" published in 1906 - which includes a woman who sold her hair.

posted 09-21-2009 02:48 PM            

Here's one of my hair earrings with two different colors of hair. You can see if you look carefully that the two center drops are slightly lighter than the two flanking them, but not enough to make a dramatic design statement.

On closer inspection, I decided the three braids in the hair bracelet were the same color after all. But here's a better shot of the plaque, showing the different colors: