Cartier Panthère

The Library Essay

A Jeweller Takes a Familiar

The panther entered Cartier's vocabulary before the First World War as an abstract pattern of onyx spots on a wristwatch, and became the house's presiding animal under Jeanne Toussaint, the formidable creative director whom Louis Cartier himself nicknamed La Panthère. Under her eye the cat took three-dimensional form, most famously in the brooches made for the Duchess of Windsor in the late 1940s.

Vivienne Becker, a historian of jewellery, traces the animal's career for Assouline's Legends series. It is a study in how a luxury house acquires an emblem honestly, not by decree but by decades of variations on one form, until the panther could stand for Cartier without a word of lettering beside it.