Harry Emanuel’s new premises, Brook Street, Hanover Square, London (The Illustrated London News, London, Saturday, 17 November 1860, p. 455); although somewhat altered, No. 2 Brook Street still stands and is presently the headquarters of the United National Bank
The humming bird necklace I mentioned last week was devised by Harry Emanuel, one of the most remarkable figures of the London silver and jewellery trade. He caused a sensation at the 1867 Paris Exhibition by his display of the silver mechanical swan which so delighted Mark Twain and which still thrills visitors today to the Bowes Museum, County Durham.
Emanuel was not 25 when in 1855 he took over the family business. Although it was already successful he determined that it should rival the leading firms of Garrard’s, Hunt & Roskell and Hancock’s. Few were surprised when in 1860 he opened new premises in Brook Street, Mayfair, decorated in the Elizabethan style, its ebony cabinets filled with every conceivable type of wrought gold, silver, jewellery, object of vertu and enamels. The focus of the showroom was an ornamental stove like a gigantic flower vase brimming with hot-house plants. For a man who sold humming bird necklaces and persuaded the Sultan of Turkey to purchase a jewelled gold-mounted ivory stereoscope, nothing was too exotic.
Harry Emanuel himself was an exotic. His fortune made, partly from South African diamonds, he sold his business. In 1874 he purchased a Portuguese title, that of the Baron de Almeda, and removed to Paris with his wife where they lived in great luxury. In 1880 he agreed to represent the impoverished San Dominican state as Minister Plenipotentiary to France, which of course opened many doors, social and political. He died at Nice in 1898.
John Culme, who for many years has been connected with Sotheby's Silver Department, is author of several books and articles, including The Directory of Gold and Silversmiths, 1838-1914, published in 1987, and co-author with Nicholas Rayner of The Jewels of the Duchess of Windsor. He is also a Liveryman of the Goldsmiths' Company, London.
