Tadema Gallery London. Jewellery from the 1860s to 1960s

From the Toledo Museum of Art to the British Museum, from the Pforzheim Jewellery Museum to the National Museums of Scotland: jewellery from the Tadema Gallery has found a place in the world’s foremost museums. In the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, for example, there are Tadema brooches by William Lucas Cranach, René Foy and John Bonnor – each being the sole specimen by the respective artist held in the museum.

Yet the Tadema Gallery is known not just for its unique items of jewellery; the comprehensive expertise, meticulous research and distinguished flair of the two gallery founders make this an unforgettable institution.

Both Sonya (née Hirsch, 1946) and David Newell-Smith (1937–2017) began their careers as professional photographers. They married in 1964 and founded the gallery in London’s famous Camden Passage in Islington in 1978. It is significant that both started out from their broader interest in art only to find each other later in jewellery.

In their gallery, they presented a diverse selection of spectacular pieces by key designers from the Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, and modernist periods. Fascinated with sculptural qualities and sophisticated detailing, they had an eye for only the very best.
As with their gallery, the book Tadema Gallery London is based on the couple’s distinctive skills: all photographs are by David Newell-Smith and were carefully selected by Sonya. In the illustrated section, comprising almost 380 pages, a panorama of 100 years of jewellery history, unequalled in its quality and breadth of content, now unfolds before the reader.

For clarity, this section is divided into four motifs – from the world of nature via the human figure and mythological symbolic representations to art historical genres – and each chapter commences with a categorisation in jewelry history by the well-known jewellery expert Beatriz Chadour-Sampson.

A comprehensive look at the gallery’s history and an appendix featuring detailed catalogue information and images of the individual pieces’ makers’ marks (‘Check- list’), biographies of the jewellers and artists, a substantial bibliography, and personal dedications from the world of jewellery makes this book an indispensable reference work for all collectors, enthusiasts, and curators in this field.
 

About the author

Beatriz Chadour-Sampson, based in England, is an international jewelry historian, author, and lecturer. Her jewelry interests range from the classical world to the present day and her extensive list of publications includes a doctoral thesis on the Italian goldsmith Antonio Gentili da Faenza (1980), the catalogue for the jewelry collection of the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne (1985), and catalogues of the historical and contemporary rings in the Alice and Louis Koch Collection, Switzerland(1994 and 2019). She has been curator for 35 years of the latter collection and continues to advise the Swiss National Museum, Zurich, where it is held today. At the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Beatriz was consultant curator for the redesign of the William and Judith Bollinger Jewelry Gallery, guest curator of the Pearls exhibition (2013–14), and regularly runs courses on jewelry history.

Sonya Newell-Smith began her career as a freelance photojournalist working for the Sunday Telegraph and other newspapers and magazines. From 1978 to 2018 she ran Tadema Gallery in London, along with her late husband David Newell-Smith (1937–2017), formerly a photographer for the Observer newspaper. Today she continues to run the Gallery online and follows her passion for street photography which she shared over many decades with David.