During an archive tour, Ms. Peltason turned over page after page of Webb’s proposals for dragon bracelets, Maltese cross brooches and teardrop earrings worthy of Bollywood costumes, many of them with no identification. “Our job is to be forensic scientists,” reconnecting images and receipts, she said.
Webb catered to clients as famous as Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand but shied away from news coverage for his own biography. He gave few interviews, was rarely photographed and barely spoke about his North Carolina childhood. Ms. Peltason has been interviewing longtime customers, friends, lovers and employees. The book covers how this self-taught designer found ideas in gardens, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and in vintage reference books with titles like “Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Rope Work.”
His Southern charm persuaded heiresses and entrepreneurs to hand over their Edwardian and Art Deco jewelry, to be broken up and remade into something splashier. He also worked on diplomatic gifts for the Kennedy White House, using Arizona malachite and Utah citrines. Another specialty was animal motifs; sometimes the animals themselves are depicted wearing hoop earrings and diamond cuffs.
Starting Jan. 16, “David Webb: Society’s Jeweler,” an exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., will display 80 baubles along with related sketches. In time for the new book and show, reams of vintage Webb are coming on the market, at galleries including Richters of Palm Beach and the David Webb company’s Manhattan headquarters.
New York fairs and auctions in the next few weeks will prominently feature Webb. From Friday through Sunday, lots from a Dec. 9 sale at Heritage Auctions in Dallas will be on view at the Ukrainian Institute of America on Fifth Avenue. On Dec. 7 and 8, dealers including Joyce Groussman and Michael S. Haber will offer Webb pieces at the Jewelry Show at Pratt Mansions. Bonhams, Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips and Doyle lots for early December (with estimates starting around $2,000) include Webb cuff links, brooches, rings, bracelets and earrings in the shapes of tigers, frogs, lion heads, alligators, cheetahs and rams.
SHARING THE FINDS
Hawaiian artifacts make an improbable next step for Dr. Paul Sullivan and his wife, Melinda, art and design collectors in West Hartford and Manhattan. They have already gone through phases focused on acquiring, researching and loaning bejeweled evening purses, Degas plaster sculptures, Nantucket baskets and 1720s Viennese porcelain. “We can’t help ourselves,” Dr. Sullivan said during a preview of “Aloha: Hawaiian Art and Artifacts From the Sullivan Collection,” an exhibition that opens Nov. 30 at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut. Mrs. Sullivan added, “There’s no such thing as too much of what you collect.”
The couple, after wintering in Hawaii for nearly a decade, have sold their two condos there and shipped the contents to the museum for the curators to select highlights. The museum is bringing out prints depicting 18th-century surfers and Captain Cook’s killers; ceramic taro leaves; seashell jewelry; woodblocks carved with silhouettes of traditional sacred plants; benches and dressers made from koa wood; and a surfboard painted with palm trees.
The Pacific Rim souvenirs collection made sense as a New Britain display, the museum staff said, since it has a few connections to the Northeast. The Sullivans are loaning a 1921 beach scene by D. Howard Hitchcock, a grandson of Massachusetts Congregationalist missionaries who became part of a Hawaii art movement called the Volcano School. An 1868 harbor view, purchased at Hirschl & Adler in Manhattan, is one of a dozen known works by Joseph Nawahi, a self-taught native Hawaiian painter and politician. He depicted tiny figures of farm and waterfront laborers against backdrops of British and American flags and missionary church steeples.
Mrs. Sullivan and her husband are both now in their 70s. When asked what they will start acquiring next, she replied half in jest that collecting and the eureka moments that occur during research were becoming too stimulating and posed a cardiac risk. “What we need to do,” she said, “is calm down.”
A KNOTTY EXERCISE
No one knows yet whether the Incas knotted strings to record payments, tell stories or take attendance. About 850 of their clusters of dyed cotton and animal fleece strands known as khipus have been found so far.
Gary Urton, the chairman of Harvard’s anthropology department, will disclose some of his latest khipu discoveries in a Dec. 5 lecture at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington.
Professor Urton has researched knots, cord thicknesses and dyes that varied in different regions and eras, and Spanish conquerors’ writings about khipus based on Incas’ explanations of the codes. But no one has connected a particular khipu to its translation in any archive.
“If we find that, that’s our Rosetta khipu,” he said.
He keeps adding khipus to an online database; in January he will visit an Inca fort excavation where buried strings have just become visible. Last month, when he gave a lecture at Stanford, a khipu that he had never seen turned up in the university collection.
“It’s a sad little thing, but they have one,” Mr. Urton said. With high-tech tests including DNA analysis emerging in the field, he added, “We could perhaps begin to map where the raw materials came from.”
Sabine Hyland, an anthropologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, has been analyzing khipus produced after the Spanish conquest and sometimes damaged by bat urine. She has tracked down scattered translations of knot patterns and 19th-century archaeologists’ field notes, and she has also learned to avoid fakes. “Suddenly in these upscale boutiques in Cuzco, you have all these reproduction khipus,” she said in an interview.
At the Merrin Gallery in Manhattan, a khipu priced at $8,500 dates to about 1500. Its nearly 100 strands of llama and alpaca fleece are tinted beige, cream, blue and red.
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