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Fred Samuel was born in Buenos Aires in 1908, the son of a jeweller. He arrived in Paris at age sixteen, just as Japanese cultured pearls were beginning to change the pearl trade, and trained with the Worms brothers, dealers in pearls and gemstones, who were among their early importers into France. In 1936, Fred Samuel opened his shop at 6 rue Royale, away from the established jewellery houses of Place Vendôme, and introduced himself on his business card as a ‘modern jeweller and designer’, signalling his ambition to develop a style of his own. Cultured pearls became his speciality. He had a particular eye for those with a creamy body colour and a faint pink overtone, a combination that came to be known as the ‘Fred colour’.
Samuel traced his fascination with gemstones to the sunlight he remembered from his childhood in Argentina. In his memoirs, he described stones as both receptacles and sources of light. Pearls offered a subtle example: their lustre comes from nacre, the same material that lines the inside of certain shells. Its minute layers interact with light, so that hints of colour appear and recede as the angle changes. On a pearl, this effect plays across a small, curved surface. Mother of pearl marquetry gave Fred’s designs room to work with these effects on an altogether different scale.
The jewelled evening accessory was already part of Parisian life when Samuel opened his shop on rue Royale. The fitted cases of the 1930s had compartments for everything from a powder compact to a miniature watch. In the 1980s and 1990s, during a particularly inventive period in which Fred revisited earlier jewellery trends, the house gave the evening bag a sculptural character of its own. Conceived as pieces of high jewellery, the bags combined white or grey mother of pearl with gold, diamonds and coloured stones for a high impact effect. A butterfly, a scarab or a lion’s head might determine the entire shape of a bag.
The making was entrusted to the Paris workshop of Jean-Pierre Brun, a master goldsmith whose family company, founded by his father Pierre in 1936, produced gold work for Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Boucheron and Chaumet, and had been fashioning gold evening bags and compacts for the great houses since the 1960s. The Fred archives record that some examples took more than 700 hours to make. Each piece of shell had to fit precisely, and its sheen mattered as much as its colour. Against the broad glow of the nacre, the diamonds could flash and the coloured stones could lend depth.
In Memoirs of a Jeweller, Samuel recalls the series and singles out the beauty of mother-of-pearl, whose soft, rippling sheen comes into its own in evening light. It was a quality best seen in movement. A turn of the wrist might catch a diamond for an instant, then send a wash of colour across shell that had looked almost matte a moment before.
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John ffrench was an instrumental figure in the design industry in Ireland and a distinguished pioneer of Irish studio pottery.
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"I should declare my hand. I have a weakness for pictures that punch above their physical weight, and for artists who have been quietly underrated for too long. This pair is both. They are intimate enough to live with at close quarters and serious enough to repay any amount of looking. If the market has lately shown signs of catching up with eighteenth-century Irish painting and I think it has, these two small panels feel, to me, like exactly the sort of thing that will look obvious in twenty years’ time."
Adam’s is honoured to present works from the collection of Lord Rossmore in the upcoming Country House Collections auction at Howth Castle on 28th April. It is seldom that an influential Irish family collection that has survived through the generations comes to the open market.
Works Sold at Adam’s Now in the Irish National Collection
A great opportunity to purchase both established and lesser-known artist’s work at an accessible price point, the Online Picture Auction is the first of many sales to be hosted at Adam’s in 2026. It is perfect for those looking to start a collection and the discerning collector alike.
Through this article, let our expert Adam Pearson guiding you to the (re)discovery of the once established Irish painter Richard O’Neill.
James Adam & Sons Ltd, Fine Art Auctioneers and Valuers, 26 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,
D02 X665, Ireland
