An Art Deco brooch designed as a jade Buddha with a radiating diamond aura and ruby belly button seated on a carved onyx, coral and diamond plinth, in platinum. Cartier, France #02208. Accompanied by a JAJA certificate d'expertise by Olivier Bachet.

To the informed eye, this brooch contains a remarkable density of ideas, making it a small but mighty relic of one of Cartier’s most compelling and collectible chapters. During the early twentieth century, the great Western jewelry houses looked widely beyond Europe for inspiration, drawing from the art, architecture, and decorative traditions of India, Persia, Egypt, China, Japan, and Russia. This fascination flourished during the Art Deco period, when jewelers embraced bold geometry, vivid color contrasts, hardstone carving, and increasingly imaginative combinations of materials. Within this climate, Cartier created jewels that evoked a dreamlike vision of the wider world, sometimes blending references from multiple cultures into compositions that were more fantasy than literal translation. In this miniature sculpture, jade, coral, and onyx are brought together with diamonds, rubies, and platinum in a composition that could not have been produced at any other time or place than when it was born.