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Jewelry Materials

Victorian agate jewelry has been called “Scottish agate” or “Scottish pebble jewelry.” In many cases, it is a misnomer because a great deal of “Scottish agate” was made in England, not Scotland, and often using stones that came from Germany rather than the British Isles. The first jewelry to make use of attractive pebbles was produced in Scotland, and agate jewelry does owe its popularity to the unbridled enthusiasm for all things Scottish that swept England in the mid-1800s. As pebble jewelry became increasingly popular in both England and France, England’s foremost jewelry manufacturing center, Birmingham, began full-scale production of “Scottish” baubles. With booming business, Birmingham began a quest for new sources of agates and began importing quantities of non-indigenous stones from Germany, India, and Africa.

Agate is a variety of quartz, a mineral composed of silicon dioxide. It can be clear and colorless or have variegated color arranged in layered stripes such as banded agate (usually black or brown and white) or Montrose agate (gray striated). It can have cloudlike or mosslike dendritic formations, as in moss agate (milky white agate with green inclusions) or mocha agate (brown inclusions). There are three distinct categories of quartz: Transparent which is crystalline stones such as amethysts, citrines, and cairngorms. There is translucent, which includes chalcedony, carnelian or cornelian, and bloodstone. There is also opaque, which would include jasper.

Cut-steel jewelry is comprised of tiny nails or studs mounted into base plates. It has been said that the earliest source for cut-steel was the horseshoe nails that littered the streets of Woodstock, Wolverhampton, and Salisbury.

Berlin iron was made by molding shapes in wax, impressing these shapes in a fine sand, and then filling the impression with molten iron. The cast pieces were left to cool, finished by hand, and lacquered black. The most common examples of this jewelry are parures as well as rings, combs, and fans

Celtic Revival Style

The only truly traditional form of Irish jewellry was the Claddagh ring, a gold wedding ring in the form of hands holding a crowned heart which passed from mother to daughter in the Claddagh district of Galway city. After Queen Victoria's comment about ancient brooches, Dublin jewellers soon appropriated the Early Christian ring-brooches found in Scotland as part of a joint Celtic heritage, making copies of them alongside those found in Ireland. It is not easy to discovery who bought Celtic-revival jewellery beyond the royal family and the Lords Lieutenant's wives. Visual and anecdotal evidence is sparse and the examples in museums rarely have provenances from private owners.