A Pair of Diamond-Encrusted Leopards From David Webb’s Menagerie

Born in 1925 in North Carolina, the jewelry designer David Webb grew up idolizing his grandfather, an engraver, and at 14 began apprenticing under his uncle, who was a jewelry maker. Three years later, Webb left the South to make a name for himself in Manhattan, where the brand was officially established in 1948 with a shop on West 46th Street. By the late ’50s, Webb, who collected children’s books on wild beasts and made weekly pilgrimages to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study Scythian and ancient Egyptian gold artifacts, had become best known for his enameled animal pieces. Banishing barnyard and household creatures from his jewels, the designer, who died in 1975 at the age of 50, favored a far more exotic and mythical menagerie of big cats, zebras, frogs and more. His creations — from compacts shaped like tortoises to carved coral bracelets inspired by the Hindu makara sea dragon — were coveted by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Vreeland and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and were, as one society reporter wrote, “as essential as the food and drink at La Grenouille to the fashion society clan.”

Paramount to Webb’s creative process was the act of sketching. Thanks to these drawings — nearly 40,000 of which are now part of the brand’s archives — Webb’s legacy lives on, having inspired many of the house’s designs over the past five decades. The latest reimagined pieces are a pair of whimsical chandelier earrings featuring two diamond-encrusted leopards peering out from behind gilded bars. Set with cabochon emeralds, brilliant-cut diamonds, black enamel, 18-karat gold and platinum, these jewels pay homage to two of Webb’s illustrations from the ’60s, one of a leopard brooch with emerald eyes and diamonds for spots, the other a tiger ring, the cat housed inside a small cage of gold that sits atop the finger. (The latter was finally made by the house in 2018.) Commissioned by a longtime collector of David Webb, these majestic felines are just as bold today as they were when the designer’s pencil first touched paper.

Photo assistant: Sam Kang. Set designer’s assistant: Kayleigh Snowden