Tiffany’s Bird On A Rock Collection Soars Into Its Next Chapter

Jean Schlumberger placed a bird on a rock. Nathalie Verdeille gave it somewhere to fly. Inside the artist’s decade-long project to make Tiffany & Co’s most beloved object the most coveted thing in High Jewellery

The room isn’t as quiet as very serious things tend to require. In a private salon in Paris, Nathalie Verdeille is walking me slowly along a console laid with Tiffany High Jewellery – birds and nests and cascading wings, stones in colours that have fantastic names, pieces that have been three years in the making and are, at this moment, being shown for the very first time. She points to one of them – a paradise bird perched above a boulder opal, brown and volcanic and alive with shifting colour – and says something that anyone who has spent time with her will recognise immediately as the centre of everything she does. “I always start with the centre stone,” she says. “Always, always, always.”

Nathalie has held the lead for Tiffany’s High Jewellery artistry for long enough now to have transformed it, without fanfare – which is, in this category, the most difficult way to do it. The house’s record in status in jewellery is amongst the most formidable in the world. The Elsa Peretti Bone cuff. Paloma Picasso’s X collection. And above all, Jean Schlumberger’s Bird on a Rock: a creature perched on a stone of impressive size, the proportions deliberately, almost stubbornly, off – more rock than jewellery, more presence than pretty. Jean made it in 1965, nine years after joining the house. Then it became an icon, and icons in jewellery, as in most things, tend to settle. The assumption is that tinkering means diminishing them. That the original is the original, and everything after is something less.