How Cartier Made a Jewelry Zoo

Cartier Archives / Cartier Paris

There seems to be no way to prove this actually happened, but like all good legends, it should be true. While on safari with Louis Cartier, Jeanne Toussaint, head of Cartier jewelry, shouted: “Emeralds, onyx, diamonds, a brooch!” after spotting a panther in the wild. Photos in the Car­tier archives (see above) documenting the duo on such expeditions make the story plausible, and it also has jewelry history to back it up.

Panthers have been part of the Car­tier menagerie since the early 20th century.
The Panthère can first be spotted in a ­Car­tier wristwatch from 1914, when the pattern appeared in diamond and onyx. That year a Cartier display card prominently featured the feline at the feet of an elegantly dressed woman.

Toussaint had plans bigger than a postcard for the animals in her kingdom, and she pushed her team to create more figurative, three-­dimensional pieces.

The Origin of Species

Cartier has been building its menagerie since 1914. The results are much better than glass.

Many visits to Paris’s Vincennes Zoo ensued. In 1927 designer Peter Lemarchand joined her team, ready to pounce with the technical skill to realize her vision. Mission accomplished. The first 3D Cartier Panthère was created in 1948 for the Duchess of Windsor, using a 116.74-carat emerald from her husband’s own collection. The cat, in gold and black enamel, was perched above the enormous stone.

But to keep collectors prowling, one must broaden the brood. There was the liberated bird placed defiantly in a window when the occupation of Paris ended in 1944. The serpents that have slithered in and out and in again. The insects and fantasy chimera bangles. Onyx-spotted giraffes that ambled in, beginning in the 1980s, around the same time the zebras began to dazzle. A decade earlier, Mexican actress María Félix headed to Cartier to assemble a necklace of two fully articulated crocodiles—with 1,023 yellow diamonds, 1,060 emeralds, and two cabochon rubies. Cartier’s artisans knew their way around a wild thing.

Courtesy of Cartier

Courtesy of Cartier

Here and top: Rings from Cartier’s new Flora & Fauna collection, along with archival photographs, illustrating Jeanne Toussaint's interest in nature as early as 1913, before she began working for Cartier.”

Many of these Cartier animals, the panther most notably, have become icons—of the house, and of the decorative arts. The kingdom continues to expand with a new collection that puts the full menagerie on display, most boldly in a series of oversize cocktail rings that, in scale and color and craft, appear almost lifelike. Imagination and inspiration live in the heart and the mind, but it is in skilled hands—those of the Cartier workshop—that they are translated into reality. Each onyx spot on a panther’s back is meticulously placed there by an artisan. A rhinoceros ring is realized by crafting alternate surfaces of white gold, polished or brushed by hand to achieve the right color, as close as possible to the original. The parrot’s head is chiseled and fused in platinum and yellow gold. Specialized paving techniques make sure those carp’s lips look ready to pucker.

And when a rhino is looking straight at you, don’t you want it to be with spessartite garnet, with horns of smoky quartz? Wouldn’t Polly get a better cracker if her body were set with coral and tsavorite garnets? Toussaint’s vision, in ambition, proportion, scale, and dimension, continues to hold forth. Imagine her now, sailing down a river somewhere and spotting a carp: “Onyx, sapphire, diamond, a ring!”

This story appears in the October 2026 issue of Town & Country.

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Editor-in-Chief Stellene Volandes is a jewelry expert, and the author of Jeweler: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Design (Rizzoli).

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