Summer 2017

Summer 86 www.afamag.com | www.incollect.com Fig. 5: Pair of gold rings, Tiffany & Co., retailer (1837–present), Boston, 1996. Gold. Gift of Stephen H. Borkowski in honor of the Michaud-Borkowski families. and wife Zephaniah and Hannah Leonard, who died on the same day in 1766. Beneath the coffin-shaped crystals lie tiny drawings of skeletons. Family tradition held that the eldest daughter of the eldest son in each generation would inherit the ring. Collect tells the stories of six women and the jewelry that had special meaning. Among them is Sara Norton, the daughter of Charles Eliot Norton, the first professor of the history of fine arts at Harvard University and friend to many late-nineteenth-century cultural luminaries. She was her father’s near-constant companion and the editor of his published letters. As portrayed in a 1910 portrait by English artist Hugh de Twenebrokes Glazebrook (Fig. 9), she might still have been in half-mourning for her father, who died in October 1908. The ear pendants she wore for her portrait are amethysts suspended from natural pearls, made by New York City jewelers Black, Starr & Frost, which she kept in a box marked with her hand-drawn monogram (Fig. 9a). Fourteen-year-old Ati Gropius, daughter of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus School in Germany, received a special present when she and her parents attended a New Year’s party at the Massachusetts’ home of neighbors Connie and Marcel Breuer’s in 1941. Her mother, Ise Gropius, recorded the event in annotated Fig. 4: Bracelet, possibly Providence, Rhode Island, ca. 1885. Silver, “Liberty Seated” dimes. Historic New England; Gift of Miss Lydia G. Chace.