Wilhelm Schmidt Biography
Wilelm Schmidt was born in Idar Oberstein, a renowned European center for the mineral, gemstone and lapidary trade in 1845. At the age of 15, he was sent to Paris as an apprentice and was taken under the wing of the cameo cutter, Arsène, who trained him according to the neoclassical tradition. Despite his exceptional talent and winning prizes for designing and creating cameos, by the time he graduated in 1860, the French fashion for stone cameos, mounted as jewelry or collector's items for amateur antiquity enthusiasts, was waning . After a few difficult years, Schmidt eventually settled in London, where he opened an engraving business in Hatton Garden. He collaborated with his brother Louis, a gem dealer, who imported numerous unusual and rare specimens for Schmidt to work with. Schmidt carved cameos for many top jewelry companies, including John Brogden, Carlo Giuliano, and Child & Child (the item in question appears to be by this maker). He attracted the attention of prestigious patrons, including the Museum of Practical Geology, to which he sold cameos engraved in quartz, sardonyx, jasper, labradorite, moonstone and, of course, opal - the most unusual stone of all, which would has become its hallmark. Carving opal was an extremely risky undertaking, as it can easily crack and be damaged by temperature changes. As stated by the late scholar Gertrud Seidmann, an expert on Schmidt's work, to whom we are indebted for our knowledge of him: "opal cameos, though rare, were not unknown (in the 19th century), but Schmidt invented a new technique: instead of carving the entire cameo out of precious opal, he used blanks with a thin layer of precious opal overlaid on the matrix, in the same way that contrasting layers of agate were traditionally used to highlight the background." Schmidt never signed his work, and the cameos he produced for jewelers and dealers were never credited to him. Some examples, attributed by Seidmann, are present in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London, the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
