Antique Victorian Blackamoor Bracelet Eight Enameled Faces Gold Plated Circa 1880s
This extraordinary Victorian-era bracelet presents seven hand-enameled Blackamoor portrait faces, each wearing a delicately rendered turban, linked along a yellow plated metal composition that commands both attention and reflection.
The origins of Blackamoor jewelry trace to 16th-century Venice, where Moorish figural motifs first appeared as symbols of exoticism and imperial power. Through the Baroque and Rococo periods, these pieces proliferated across European courts and noble households, their turbaned figures simultaneously celebrated and objectified — reflections of a world in which the beauty of craft and the brutality of colonialism and the slave trade occupied the same decorative object. By the 1880s, when this bracelet was made, the tradition had traveled far from Venice, carried into the commercial jewelry markets of Europe and America by artisans who inherited the aesthetic without always interrogating its meaning.
That meaning is not separate from this piece — it is this piece. To wear it or collect it is to hold that history in your hands: the skill of the enamelist who painted each face with remarkable delicacy, and the discomfort that demands we look clearly at what beauty has been asked to carry.
Dimitria's three decades in the jewelry industry — sourcing and presenting significant antique and estate pieces with the care and expertise she has brought to Petra Star in historic downtown Mystic, CT — make her uniquely positioned to place objects like this one in the hands of collectors who understand them. Pieces this layered with social and material history are rarely found in this condition, and rarer still when offered with the honest context they deserve.
Gold plated construction, possibly brass or plated silver, is sound and lustrous. Enamel faces are intact with expected age-appropriate surface character. No maker's marks present, consistent with many American and Continental commercial jewelry houses of the period.
Material: yellow plated, possibly brass or plated silver
Measurements: 7.5" length x 7.7 mm wide
Weight: 12.5 grams
Markings: none
Period: Circa 1880s
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