Catching the Bug: Archaeology, Entomology and Victorian Jewellery

Insects, and in particular beetles, were a recurring trend in jewellery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Taking its cue from wider European fashions, where imitations of insects and the setting of actual insects into jewellery proved popular, the trend is often discussed in the context of the Victorian obsession with natural history, reaching its height in the 1870s and 1880s. Incorporating shimmering imitations, and even actual insect carapaces, these objects suggest an appreciation of liveliness that survives even after the insect’s transformation into ornament.

The Granville Parure, now at the British Museum, is a spectacular if macabre survival of this trend, made up of the bodies of forty-six iridescent green South American weevils gifted to Foreign Secretary George Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Granville, to mark the Anglo-Portuguese trade treaty. Granville had the beetles set into a gold tiara, necklace and earrings in the Egyptian style by jewellery firm Phillips Brothers, going back to an earlier appearance of the beetle motif in British jewellery in the 1850s and 1860s, when antique scarabs taken from both Egyptian and Etruscan archaeological sites featured prominently in jewellery made in the archaeological revival style. There, the carved scarab suggested not just the liveliness of the insect it represented, but also the survival of an ancient historical past for the nineteenth-century present.

Considering analogous relations between both types of jewellery and the production and dissemination of scientific and historical knowledge, as well as their respective links to empire and British colonial power, this talk explores how beetles – both historical and natural – caught the British imagination.

Image credit: Phillips Brothers, Lady Granville's Beetle Parure, 1884-1885, die-stamped gold, weevil tissue, 21 x 29.50 cm. © The Trustees of the British Museum (2016,8037.1.a-e).