Cartier Tutti Frutti Bracelet (online-auction record)

A queen's dresses and a trip to India

Cartier's first jewel in this style was a necklace for Queen Alexandra, wife of King Edward VII and, through him, Empress Consort of India. She commissioned it to complement three Indian-style dresses. A 2020 trade report dates that necklace to 1901.

Ten years later, in 1911, Jacques Cartier traveled to India for the first time. He found a long tradition of carved gemstones, emeralds especially, worked with leaves, flowers and other motifs from nature, and he came home with a large collection of carved colored stones. Cartier was also building relationships with Indian maharajas, some of whom entrusted the firm with resetting historic stones. Jacques's travels to India continued for 28 years, alongside trips to Ceylon to buy sapphires directly.

Back in Paris, the firm combined those carved stones with diamonds and platinum, taking advantage of recent advances in working platinum. The carving was the point: instead of being faceted, the stones were shaped into leaves, berries and flowers, which gave the jewels a sculptural surface. Many of the carved stones were historic objects themselves, often taken from older Indian jewelry and given new settings.

A name Cartier did not choose

Cartier never called these jewels 'Tutti Frutti.' The nickname was applied later by collectors and the trade as shorthand for a style that is recognizable at a glance, and the firm adopted it only decades afterward.

Jewels in the style were shown at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, and they quickly found fashionable clients, among them Mrs. Cole Porter and Daisy Fellowes. The style flourished from the late 1920s into the 1930s.

Tutti Frutti sits in an odd place inside Art Deco. Most Deco jewelry is built on clean geometry. These pieces are crowded with carved leaves and irregular forms, held in order by diamond-set platinum. Cartier made them both for stock and to special order, and bracelets have become the most sought-after form. All share Mughal-style carved stones, but each piece is a variation, not a copy.

Vines, rubies in pairs and enamel on one side

This bracelet is designed as meandering vines set with old European and single-cut diamonds, about 8 carats in total, graded F to I in color and VS to SI in clarity. Among them sit carved emeralds, rubies and sapphires, accented by emerald beads and cabochon sapphires and emeralds, with calibré-cut onyx and black enamel. It is 7 inches long, signed Cartier and numbered 1604.

The sale catalog pointed to two things that set it apart from other Tutti Frutti bracelets. Its stones are especially vivid, with rubies predominating; one report noted that the rubies are set in pairs throughout. And its lines of black enamel run along the trim of only one side of the elements, an asymmetry that echoes the irregular shapes of the leaves.

The clasp returns to strict Art Deco: pavé-set diamonds highlighted by onyx triangles and chevron-shaped closures. For a bracelet of similar design, the catalog pointed to color plate 44 in the 1984 edition of Hans Nadelhoffer's Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary.

The catalog dates the bracelet to circa 1930, and a 2020 trade report says the same. The published description gives no weights for the colored stones and no mine origins.

Sold from a laptop in a pandemic

The bracelet had never been to auction. It was created around 1930 and had passed down through an American family for more than 30 years. The same family had earlier sold the 35-carat Flagler Emerald at auction in 2015 for $2.8 million.

In April 2020, with live auctions closed by the coronavirus pandemic, the bracelet was offered on its own as a single-lot online sale in New York. Bidding opened on Friday, April 24, and closed on April 28. The estimate was $600,000 to $800,000. Five bidders competed, and the bracelet sold to an undisclosed buyer for $1.34 million.

It was reported as the highest price for any jewel sold in an online auction and, at the time, the highest price for any jewel sold at auction in 2020. Only one object had fetched more in an online sale held by the same firm: Friedrich von Hayek's 1974 Nobel Prize in Economics, sold in 2019 for $1.5 million.

Where it sits among Tutti Frutti records

The 2020 price was not a record for the style itself. In 2014 a similar openwork Tutti Frutti bracelet by Cartier from the collection of Evelyn H. Lauder, sold to benefit the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, brought $2.2 million, then a record for any Cartier Tutti Frutti bracelet. That piece carried about 6.25 carats of diamonds with carved emeralds and rubies, onyx beads and faceted rubies in platinum.

What made the 1930 bracelet a landmark was the channel, not the number: it sold for seven figures with no saleroom at all. By then the same house's online jewelry sales in 2020 had raised $7.4 million with 93 percent of lots sold, drawing bidders from more than 30 countries, and 30 percent of bidders that year were buying from it for the first time.

More than a century after Jacques Cartier first brought carved stones back from India, Tutti Frutti remains one of Cartier's best-known expressions of cross-cultural design, and later pieces continue to reinterpret it.

The numbers

Carat weight

About 8 carats of diamonds in total; colored-stone weights not published

Color / clarity

Diamonds F to I color, VS to SI clarity

Origin

Not stated for the carved stones

Cutter / maker

Cartier, numbered 1604; carved emeralds, rubies and sapphires in the Mughal tradition

Length

7 inches

Date

Circa 1930

Timeline

1. 1901

   Cartier makes an Indian-inspired necklace for Queen Alexandra, its first jewel in the style.

2. 1911

   Jacques Cartier makes his first trip to India and gathers carved colored stones.

3. 1925

   Jewels in the style are shown at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

4. 1930

   Cartier makes this bracelet, circa this year, signed and numbered 1604.

5. 1984

   A bracelet of similar design is illustrated as color plate 44 in Hans Nadelhoffer's Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary.

6. 2014

   A similar Cartier Tutti Frutti bracelet from Evelyn H. Lauder's collection sets a record for the style at $2.2 million.

7. 2015

   The family that owns the bracelet sells the 35-carat Flagler Emerald at auction for $2.8 million.

8. Apr 24, 2020

   The bracelet goes on offer in a single-lot online auction in New York.

9. Apr 28, 2020

   Bidding closes; five bidders compete and the bracelet sells for $1.34 million.

10. Apr 30, 2020

    The result is reported as the highest price for any jewel sold in an online auction.

The world in 1930

• Feb 18, 1930

  Clyde Tombaugh confirms the existence of Pluto.

• Mar 12, 1930

  Mahatma Gandhi begins the Salt March against the British salt monopoly in India.

• Jun 17, 1930

  Herbert Hoover signs the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

• Jul 13, 1930

  The first FIFA World Cup begins in Uruguay.

• Jul 30, 1930

  Uruguay beats Argentina 4-2 to win the first World Cup final in Montevideo.

• Apr 2020

  With live auctions closed during the coronavirus pandemic, auction houses move their sales online.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Cartier Tutti Frutti Bracelet (online-auction record) is number 31 of 100 in the jewelry entries of the FLOAT 100. 44 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (35 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Cartier never used the name 'Tutti Frutti' for these jewels at the time; it was applied later by the market.
• The black enamel on this bracelet is applied to one side only.
• Five bidders competed online for the bracelet over a four-day sale.
• Only one object had sold for more in the selling firm's online auctions: Friedrich von Hayek's Nobel Prize medal, at $1.5 million in 2019.
• The family that sold the bracelet had earlier sold the 35-carat Flagler Emerald for $2.8 million.
• Cartier's first jewel in the style was made for Queen Alexandra to match three Indian-style dresses.