Queen Victoria came to the throne during the full flowering of the Romantic movement. Nostalgia for the Middle Ages spread through every form of craft and art, including jewelry making. The jewelry trade began to really flourish with the discovery of gold in California in 1849 and Australia 1852.
The jewelers mainly drew their inspiration from the Renaissance, Middle Ages and the natural world. They did not copy ancient jewels exactly but tended to adapt themes to suit their fancy.
Among the Romantic Victorian jewelry designers was the well known François-Désiré Froment-Meurice of Paris. This great jeweler first conceived the idea of putting medieval motifs into jewelry paving the way for creative freedom in jewelry. He constructed the pathway to originality and fantasy, using human figures and architecture as he so wished. This free style is visible in everything created between 1840 - 1860. Knights and their ladies, angels, and so on are combined with decorative patterns drawn from furniture and ceramics with borders of strapwork or foliage. These free tendencies saw jewelry created in imitation of wood. Earrings made of tiny gold leaves encircling a berry or bud made out of a precious stone. Victorian rings and broaches were composed of ivy leaves or of bunches of grapes among their leaves. Gold, tortoiseshell and ivory were carved into twisting branches forming bracelets.
