Golden Menagerie, Temple St. Clair | Assouline

With an artist’s eye and an explorer’s heart, Temple St. Clair fashions jewelry from rare colored gems with distinctive gold work to illustrate universal narratives of the earth and cosmos. In each of the one-of-a-kind pieces that comprise her Haute Couture collection, St. Clair explores our relationship to animals through a lens of whimsy and discovery and celebrates a connoisseur’s level of gemstones and Florentine craftsmanship. The Golden Menagerie offers an exclusive window into the alchemic jeweler’s process, illustrating the collection through St. Clair’s original watercolor paintings and luminous photography of each stage of creation. From the articulated Secret Garden Serpent necklace to vibrantly jeweled Fantasy Birds earrings to a ring mounted with a falcon ready to take flight from the wearer’s finger, St. Clair’s creations come to life on the page, imbued with alchemy and artistry. Temple St. Clair discovered her passion for creative expression in gold and precious gemstones over thirty years ago. She founded her company in Florence, Italy, beginning her partnership with the world’s finest goldsmiths: the centuries-old Florentine jewelers’ guild. Barneys New York inaugurated their fine jewelry department with her first collection in 1986. St. Clair’s Golden Menagerie is a magical journey through each of her three Haute Couture collections: Mythical Creatures, Wings of Desire, and The Big Game. Mythical Creatures made its debut with a critically acclaimed exhibition at Paris’s Musée des Arts Decoratifs in January 2015; Wings of Desire was unveiled at The Salon: Art + Design in New York in November 2015; and The Big Game will be debuted at the DeLorenzo gallery in New York in December 2016. St. Clair’s collections are sold throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. In 2016, she was awarded the GEM Award for Jewelry Design, the jewelry industry’s most prestigious honor. Since 2000, Dominique Forest has been the chief curator of