The Bougainvillea Courtyard

The patron, a fifty-four-year-old woman with two adult children and her own practice, wrote to us in February. She had no anniversary to mark, no inheritance to refit, no gift to wait for. She wanted, she said, a piece commissioned to herself, by herself, for no reason other than that she had earned the right to one without an occasion.

She had been to Brazil the year before and had stood in front of a small case of unset paraiba tourmalines in a workshop in Belo Horizonte. She had not bought any of them; she had not yet decided. I want the case, she said. And I want a necklace built around what I see in them.

Plique-à-jour enamel — the technique of fired-glass cells set without a backing — has been practiced by no more than a dozen masters in the world since 1920. The maestro who took this commission is one of them.

Forty-two Mozambican paraiba tourmalines were ultimately chosen — fewer than the patron had imagined, in a tighter colour band than she had asked for, because the maestro insisted that the saturation must be consistent at every viewing angle. The plique-à-jour cells were fired one at a time over a period of four months.

The gold leaves around the stones were cast in lost-wax — each unique, each formed against a physical leaf from a magnolia tree in the maestro’s garden. The necklace is heavier than it looks; the patron has said this is the part she likes best.

It was delivered in October. She wore it to dinner the night it arrived, alone, at her own table.

A portion of this commission has returned to the Nizam Maestro Fund, supporting an apprentice in the atelier for the following two years.