Diana Scarisbrick was a late bloomer. By the standards of her day — she was born in 1928 in Victoria, Australia — most women didn’t have careers, and they certainly didn’t begin them at the age of 50. But Scarisbrick did, and by the time she passed away at 96 on December 30, 2024, she had written some 50 books and hundreds of essays on jewelry. This is an achievement nonpareil. While her range and expertise were broad, she tended to concentrate on rings and the riches of the 18th century.
Scarisbrick created a career based on passion, timing, and knowing the right people. As she said in a June 2020 podcast with Sandra Hindman, founder of gallery Les Enluminures: “My career should give hope to everybody who’d like to do something, find a purpose in their lives, because it wasn’t until I was 50 years old — that’s 40 years ago — that I discovered the joys and pleasures of researching and understanding jewelry.”
Into the ring
By all accounts, her career began as a fluke. She had been content buying and wearing jewelry, especially rings, when a friend casually floated the idea that she catalogue the ring collection at the UK’s Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Desire struck, and the pieces fell into place — including a partnership with the museum’s senior assistant keeper, Gerald Taylor, and jewelry authority Graham Hughes, who was exhibitions director at the Goldsmiths’ Company. The result was an exhibition of around 1,100 finger-rings, as they were called. The accompanying catalogue, Finger Rings: From Ancient Egypt to the Present Day, was Scarisbrick’s first full-length book, published in 1978.
Her last book came out 46 years later, a scant two months before her death. It is a triumph. The tome, Divine Jewels: The Pursuit of Beauty, showcases the exceptional collection of Kazumi Arakawa at his Albion Art Institute and features Scarisbrick’s commentary. In between, she wrote many books on rings — a particular classic being 2007’s Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty — and on diamonds, another of her passions. Other subjects that came under her keen eye included tiaras, portrait jewels, royal jewels, Chaumet, and important collections in the UK and Europe.
Indeed, the only reliable bibliography of her published works is in Liber Amicorum in Honour of Diana Scarisbrick: A Life in Jewels, edited by Hindman and Beatriz Chadour-Sampson. This celebration of Scarisbrick on her 94th birthday, with essays from 22 jewelry historians and colleagues, reflects the same level of scholarship that has long graced the pages of Scarisbrick’s own writings.
“What is so remarkable is that she has achieved so much with no formal training, and with so much prejudice against her for being a woman and a non-academic,” jeweler Nicolas Norton writes in the preface. Norton is well-positioned to voice that opinion; his family company, S. J. Phillips, had an especially close relationship with Scarisbrick for decades.
Words of praise
Many others have voiced their gratitude and respect for Scarisbrick.
Katherine Purcell of estate dealer Wartski recalls how she “supported my research into [Parisian jeweler] Falize as well as the very first exhibition I organized in 1999.”
Scarisbrick’s “contribution to the jewelry industry, through her meticulously researched books, paved the way for jewelry history and design finally to be taken seriously by the art world,” adds jewelry historian and author Joanna Hardy.
For Carol Elkins, former senior vice president at Sotheby’s, Scarisbrick “was a terrific mentor…as I assisted in the catalogue raisonné of engraved gems at the Getty Villa in Malibu, and as both cataloguer and jewelry specialist at Sotheby’s.”
At London’s Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum, Clare Phillips is unstinting in listing Scarisbrick’s superlatives: “She was the most brilliant scholar, awe-inspiring in terms of both intellect and glamour. I loved her books.”
Former V&A curator Richard Edgcumbe agrees. “Her prose is superb,” he says. “In a few lines, she could create a vivid context and make you see with fresh eyes an engraved gem, a posy ring or a sentimental jewel.”
Living with a purpose
Expressing his regard for Scarisbrick, jewelry historian and collector Benjamin Zucker relates that “more than the memory of each antique ring I would buy in London in the 1970s, ’80s and onward and discuss with Diana, I remember my last conversation with [her] before she passed away. I told her I was contributing many, many books to the Bard Graduate Center in New York in her honor…. She was so happy.”
Hindman, like Scarisbrick, came to her career later in life; she had already been teaching when she opened her gallery in her 40s. Scarisbrick wrote the introduction to Hindman’s book Toward an Art History of Medieval Rings.
“On Sunday afternoons, we sat in her Regent’s Park house talking about jewelry, her projects, my projects, and our lives,” Hindman says. “I admired Diana, and I identified with her. She had an atypical career outside of either the academic or the museum world that she fashioned for herself, with courage, strong will, and intelligence…. She told me over and over again, ‘You have to have a purpose in life.’ Diana’s purpose was jewelry, a symbol of her intellect and her faith.”
Main image: Diana Scarisbrick. (Carla van de Puttelaar)
