Japanese decoration set with pearls
Order of the crown of the First Class. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Dust-pearls, too minute to drill, and numbering over 100,000 to the ounce, were used, in the latter part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries, for the embellishment of the hair-work then so much in favor and which was placed under glass. Where foliage was represented the leaves were made of the most minute seed-pearls, graduated in size and set on an outline of enamel or white paint, the pearls being cemented to the outline. This added a softness to the hair-work and other decoration.

As long as the pearl has been known, there has been a desire to obtain possession of one in some of its degrees of perfection, and for this reason many attempts have been made to prepare something that might pass for a pearl or even suggest a pearl. Sometimes the mother-of-pearl shell has, naturally, a protuberance, either round or pear-shaped, which, if cut off and highly polished may resemble an imperfect pearl; and this operation is often so cleverly performed that, at the first glance, this object may pass for a true pearl. In Russia, and especially in Bohemia, they have gone farther than this. They have cut out a bit of mother-of-pearl shell, leaving a piece of the natural shell for the top, or the part that will be visible, and rounding off the rest of the surface so as to give it a pearly effect. These objects are of trifling value and are used in necklaces and earrings, and in the ornamentation of icons and miniature frames and even as beads. Glass with either an exterior or interior coating of a nacreous substance is sometimes made absolutely round, while at other times it is made with many imperfections so as to resemble either a marine baroque or a fresh-water irregular pearl. The North American Indian, as described elsewhere, has coated little balls of clay with a powder made from a pearl-bearing fresh-water mussel and then baked them.

XVI

FAMOUS PEARLS AND COLLECTIONS

XVI
FAMOUS PEARLS AND COLLECTIONS

The kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.

St. Matthew, XIII, 45, 46.

In the course of twenty centuries many pearls and pearl collections have become famous, either because of their intrinsic value or else through historic associations. An attempt is made here to list briefly the more important of these. While we have purposely omitted any mention of the pearl collections in private hands at the present time, some of which are more valuable than many of those noted in the following pages, we have, nevertheless, given the principal sales of pearls at auction during the past twenty years. Many specimens of remarkable size and beauty have changed hands in this way, more especially in England.

Cleopatra Pearls. Next to that “pearl of great price,” mentioned by Christ, probably the most famous of all pearls were the two which Pliny records as having been worn in the ears of Cleopatra, “the singular and onely jewels of the world and even Nature’s wonder.” This writer does not note their size, but estimates their value at sixty million sestertii. We have already quoted the passage in which Pliny relates how one of these pearls was dissolved and swallowed by Cleopatra in order to win a wager she had made with Antony. After the death of that queen the other pearl “was cut in twaine, that in memoriall of that one halfe supper of theirs, it should remaine unto posterite, hanging at both the eares of Venus at Rome in the temple of Pantheon.”[[480]] Budé estimated the value of the pearl dedicated to Venus at 250,000 escus of gold.[[481]]