For each finished image in the catalog, we sometimes have to take hundreds of shots before we get the right one. For this particular series, a total of 398 shots were taken! It’s nice to go back now and look through the ones that didn’t make the cut. There are so many good ones… the editing process is brutal!
Here’s a photo of Miss Duke from 1953, wearing her Schepps citrine cabochon bracelet and ring suite, made for her in December of 1940. At that time, the price was $500! The pairing with a crisp white shirt is absolute perfection.
The set was part of the Christie’s “Magnificient Jewels from the Doris Duke Collection” auction in 2004. (Click on images to enlarge.)
To see some of her other Schepps’ pieces, see our previous post.
A little piece of Schepps history–Patricia Schepps Vaill’s business card. So simple… because the Schepps name said it all.
Her obituary in the New York Times:
February 18, 1993 Patricia Schepps Vaill, a jewelry designer, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 74.
Until she became ill in 1990, Mrs. Vaill was acting as a design consultant. She was known for her work in the Art Deco style in jewelry and the use of beach glass and rock crystal.
Mrs. Vaill was the former president of Seaman Schepps, the Park Avenue jewelry design firm founded by her father… She took over after her father’s death in 1972, retiring in 1988.
In May 1986, Interview magazine published an article about her that was illustrated by Robert Mapplethorpe.
She was born in San Francisco. She attended L’Ecole Mont-Choisi in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the Todhunter School in New York City, where she studied American History under Eleanor Roosevelt.
Besides her daughter, Amanda, a writer in New York City, she is survived by a sister, Virginia Jane Scott of Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., and two grandchildren.
I have to thank the BrandLand blog for this image. They had found the card in the back of an old desk that was once in the Abraham & Straus department store in Brooklyn. Of course, our store is still located at 485 Park Avenue. Our phone number is still indeed PL3-9520.
In 2010, I was fortunate to catch one of the most extensive exhibitions of Irving Penn’s photography at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Whilst peering at the 120 photographs on display at the gallery, the one above (of beauty icon and writer Francine du Plessix Gray–left– with her stepfather Alexander Liberman and mother Tatiana du Plessix Liberman) stopped me dead in my tracks. The photo was taken in 1948 in New York. Tatiana is wearing Schepps’ Pearl Wrapped Link Bracelet and Earrings!
My curiosity was piqued. Who were Alex Liberman and Tatiana du Plessix Liberman? After all, you had to be a bit of a somebody to sit for Irving Penn.
