The Dutch masters

For 1500 years or more painters dedicated themselves to religious iconography, then all of a sudden in one small northern European country they changed direction and devoted themselves to more secular things. What was the trigger? Who was it who was brave enough to commission the first non-religious painting? Or was it just an enthusiasm for setting the everyday household items alongside the riches that were suddenly being brought back from other parts of the globe? Perhaps it was that the Dutch as the first to profit from empire had suddenly become rich.

Vermeer’s famous Girl with a Pearl painted in his later period probably in the 1660s was typical. The girl is probably his daughter, but she was no Virgin Mary, just an ordinary girl at first glance, but then why the gold Turkish turban on her head, why such a luminescent engrossed pearl, all luxurious trappings of the new movement asking why it might be that someone who looks so realistically like a farm girl could have such luxuries? She does not smile like the Mona Lisa but there is an engaging, knowingness to her and sophistication in her dressing.

The still life was safe territory to explore, but the first half of the 1600s was still a period of religious passions and a formative era in Christianity. For the first time we can also see women active in art. We see a society in which painting could be seen as a legitimate profession and not just an acolyte of worship and patronage. There was an artistic emancipation. And, of course, the oyster featured prominently in this movement.

Holland, Flanders, northern Germany and Belgium had oyster cultures of their own derived from the 500 miles along the Wadden Sea.

Pearls, currency of monarchy

For nearly a thousand years the entangled relationships with the Dutch ran like a seam through royal society and eventually was consummated when William 111 sailed to Torbay and seized the crown from the outmanoeuvred James 11.

The political marriage was embellished and enobled with the pearl as portraits of would-be brides where traded between families. Potential grooms could be flatted by rows of pearls in portraits.

There was a certain irony to this trade as far as the oyster was concerned. Where for the ordinary people the trade was in oysters as food, for nobility it was the pearls that travelled back and forth across the waters. One exception was the king’s sister. Despite a ban on all exports of oysters, a Dutchman Jaon Janson Steil was licensed to export oysters from Colchester to the Prince of Orange and his household, James 1’s daughter and Charles 1’s sister, the Queen of Bohemia. Judging from her portraits she glamorously showed off her royalty and appreciation, her russets were encircled with more pearls.

Charles 1’s wife, the curly haired and voluptuous Henrietta Maria of France - pictured - sailed extravagantly with her entourage to Holland, she took with her jewels and pearls to raise money for his army.

When William of Orange arrived in England in 1641 to meet his almost infant wife to be Mary he brought with him £23,000 in jewels and pearls in particular as a gift to the court.

Poor Mary. In official portraits she wore huge translucent pearls strung as necklaces around her neck and her bosom for her official portrait. But when she died (of the measles or smallpox or the bleeding that was supposed to be a cure for either or both) in 1694, Lady Stanhope took all her jewellery, linen and plate from her bedchamber while the Duchess of York was seen the next week wearing the same glorious pearls.

Strangely that same portrait illustrates another unusual closeness between England and Holland. It was by Pieter van der Faes, a Dutch portraitist who came to England and was patronised by both Charles 1 and Oliver Cromwell and then became court painter to Charles 11 and was knighted as Sir Peter Lely. His was a conventional historic portraitist role, but he was in another sense a part of the great Dutch masters of the time who illustrated much more vividly the way people lived at the time.

The English pearl

There is a curious aside to the story of the pearl in England. In one sense Caesar was proved right. Pearls were found in Britain from before Roman times.

But these, like those found in other fast running streams across northern Europe were not from oysters, but from mussels. These may well have been the ones used in the crowns of early kings.

The Venerable Bede (673-735 AD) lists the things for which Britain was known and writes…“many sorts of shellfish among them mussels in which are often found excellent pearls of all colours; red, purple, violet and green but mostly white”.

The Bishop of Rennes writing in 1070 declared British pearls as the equal of the orient. By the 12th century there was a market in Europe for Scottish pearls, although they did not fetch the same prices as those of the east. By 1355 John II forbade the jewellers from mounting Scottish and oriental pearls together, except for the ecclesiastical ornaments.

In 1521 the Privy Council appointed Pearl Conservators for Aberdeen, Ross and Sutherland to oversee the fishing in July and August, when it was supposedly the best, and ensure the finest examples were secured for the Crown. Paisley in Scotland and Irton in Cumberland were noted pearling places. The Tay, the Teith, the Eran were as well known in Victorian times for pearl fishing as for salmon

Writing in 1908 the jeweller George Frederick Kunz said:

“The summer of 1862 was most famous for pearling owing to the dryness of the season and the low water, and unusually large quantities of pearls were found, the prices ranging ordinarily from 10/- to £2 6s. Queen Victoria is said to have purchased one for 40 guineas…a necklace was purchased for £35 in 1863. The value of the whole catch in Scotland in 1864 was estimated at £12,000 to the fishermen.”

Much more of course to the jewellers and traders.

They may still be found in fast running streams, but it seems they were usually found in older wizened mussels and the agitation in the fast running waters might have started the growth and they needed time to mature. As the mussel industry moved to coastal waters, the English pearl seems to have disappeared.

Vanity to veneration

Even in its collapse the Roman empire has left us with its enthusiasm for the oysters. The trade in edible oysters may have collapsed, but the caches of pearls that the royal houses of Rome had assembled were ransacked and carried away by conquering Goths and scattered among the territorial lords of northern and western Europe bringing with them always their sense of value, treasure and importance.

From here, in the dark ages, the pearl found another expression, this time more pious as part of the religious jewellery of the first missals and manuscripts, adorning the covers of sacred bibles and texts …the pearl had passed from an item of vanity to veneration and became a symbol of all that was great in religion and could be found increasingly on altars, in sacred vessels, and as part of priestly sacraments.

For the ancient and more recent worlds the pearl had a singular value. It was natural and it was traded without artifice. Although diamonds would be known from the 8th century it was only after 1450 AD that jewellers understood how to cut and craft it and other gems and started to make them popular. Before that the pearl reigned without competition as an equal, even possibly of greater value than gold or silver.

One cruet of sharpe vinegar

The Roman enthusiasm for eating oysters did not stop them from equally appreciating the pearl though this may have had to wait for its full fanfare for Pompeys conquests towards the turn of the millennia. For one victory march Pompey himself brought back 33 crowns of pearls. For newly empowered Rome, the pearl or what the poet Manus called “the gems of the sea, which resembled milk and snow” became the first emblem of power and status. The aristocracy flaunted it. They wore it on their clothes, had it embroidered into their couches; Caligula had a pearl necklace for his horse; Nero made the actors in his theatre carry pearl encrusted masks.

The sense of envy or even cynical disgust at this excess survives with us even if the artefacts themselves have mostly perished. There is an undertone to the writings of the time. Horace sarcastically remarked that a woman “loved her pearls more than her son”. Seneca wondered that earlobes could carry so many pearls at all. And possibly there is a political overtone to the much quoted line that Caesar wanted to invade Britain to find pearls at a time when other generals and campaigns were doing just that to the south and east.

Notwithstanding the excess, the value in the pearl was maintained. It remained a symbol of rank and prestige. Caesar banned women of lesser rank from wearing them at all, which was an edict that would be repeated many times in the ensuing 1500 years.

Pearls became so expensive that it was said general Vitellius raised the money to pay for a whole military campaign by selling one of his mother’s pearl earrings.

The legendary tale of Cleopatra betting Anthony she would spend more than 10 million sesteri on a dinner for him enshrined the myth.

“The servitors set before her only one cruet of sharpe vinegar…now she had at her ears hanging these two most precious pearls…as Anthony looked wistly upon her, she took one from her ear, steeped it in the vinegar, and soon as it was liquefied, drank it off…”

Whether the pearls would have dissolved in vinegar we can probably put down to artistic licence, but she could as easily have just swallowed it in wine.

These pearls would have come from Rome’s south eastern borders, the Persian Gulf, The Red Sea and even perhaps as far as Ceylon. For eating, consignments were delivered from further north. Much is made of how many oysters were consumed at banquets. The emperor Aulus Vittellius reportedly ate 1200 oysters at one go, but presumably these might have been shared among his guests and also it would have been a mark of high status that such abundance could be put before his guests. Or the writer was just flattering him. There would also have been the practical, obvious, culinary constraints. The boats arrived with their cargo and there was a need to eat them fresh on the shell. Even American settlers in Baltimore would buy by the gross – 144 at a time, for similar reasons. The rest would have been sent to the kitchen for cooking or preserving. Even with cold rooms that were constructed underneath some villas, the oysters would not have lasted indefinitely.

The enthusiasm pushed the occupation of France and Britain and in a trading sense underline the idea that such supplies would likely have come from the Atlantic. It is hard to tell how much of a factor they might have been, but Suetoneous, the Roman biographer, says Ceasar was looking for “pearls”, and given the trade that was to develop later it could well have been a factor.

Beyond Persia

THE pearl is far from unique to European culture. India has long been an important trader and has its own resource and funded commerce with east Africa. Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was, gave its name to the pearl as much as it did to tea. Early photographs show maharajahs resplendently bedecked in huge necklaces of pearls. And round the globe, there are fragments of evidence as to the importance of oysters and pearls in the south pacific too, where the black pearl is still found today but was also a pivotal part of the islands mythology.

In Polynesian lore, the iridescence of mother-of-pearl is said to be the reflection of the sky and inspired god to create the stars. He gave pearls to light up the sea. And the god of war left the pearls in the lagoon as a thank you to the beautiful princess of Bora Bora who bore his child. The first two pearls are commemorated as Poe Rava, the Remarkable, and Poe Konini, the Peacock.

Millenia later, in the 1920s the explorers Sperry and Evans discovered one of the last of the remotest islands of New Hebredes, in Papua New Guinea. They were met by an unexpectedly macabre gathering.

“In the opposite corner of the central hut a line of mummies were placed like a barricade…bushy mops of hair still clung to the heads, and their faces wore masks of clay, with huge eyes of mother-of-pearl that shone through the gloom staring at us with an uncanny effect.”

These were not ancestral family mummies, but the decorated cadavers of their slain cannibalistic neighbours.

The Austronesians, the Neolithic people from South-East Asia, who appear to have sailed from modern day Taiwan round as far as the Solomon Islands, leave archaeological evidence of their involvement with oysters with mother-of-pearl inlays in tribal shields and statues of gods. The Solomon Islands were christened by the Spanish explorer Alvaro de Mendana in1568 because he saw so many pearls he thought he had found the source of King Solomon’s mines.

In Meso America, probably around the 8th century, the Toltecs, ancestors to the Aztecs, were feared and revered for their military prowess and artistic culture. Among the treasures they left behind were ornamental jewellery and sculptures inlaid with mother-of-pearl which has been traced back as far away as the Pacific Rim. There are mentions too of Mayan and Aztecs using pearls in different manners, which given the abundance that the Spanish would find later around Panama is logical. The beautiful thorny oysters – spondylus, although technically now classified as part of the scallop family - is found off Ecuador and seems to have been a part of trade inland with Peru perhaps as early as 2500BC. When Caral city in Peru was excavated the tombs were found to contain fragments of jewellery using both mother of pearl and fashioned from the spondylus shell. It was dated 2527 BC. As archaeology creeps ever further back into time, the oyster and the pearl seem to go with it.

Pearls in the ancient middle east

Possibly the oldest pearl necklace still in existence, comes from ancient Persia, a Queen's tomb from about 2,400 years ago. The Susa , now Shush, 150 miles east of the Tigris in Khuzestan province of Iran, necklace has three surviving rows of 72 pearls each, although it is thought it originally had up to 500. It is held in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

In Egypt, mother of pearl seems to have been in use as far back as 4,200 BC, brought probably by the Persians who certainly had easier access and used it before then. An oyster shell amulet was a popular ornament in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom - 2040 to 1750 BC - usually, but not exclusively because Tutankhamun wore one in his coffin - they were worn by women. Gold and silver replicas of oyster shells were found enscribed with the name Senwosret 1 who reined from 1965 to 1920 BC.

Egyptian soldiers may have used oyster shells as badges, possibly as a mark of an armed guard and therefore that gold and silver replicas were a significant mark of officer status. Fewer exact examples survive in the middle east than elsewhere because the acidity in the soil has destroyed the original but we can trace their usage second hand as representations in art and jewellery.

The shell amulet was thought to promote health – the word wedja in Egyptian meant both health as in sound and healthy and… oyster. Copies were fashioned in gold and silver and electrum (an alloy of both) probably for princesses and queens but shell amulets have also been found in poor graves beside pottery at pre-dynastic sites like the Nubian temple excavations at Hierakonpolis.

Senebtisy's burial chamber revealed 25 sheet-gold oyster-shells, hanging from the lowest of three rows of tiny ball beads of cornelian, feldspar and dark-blue glazed composition, all strung between gold multiple bead spacers. Princess Sithathor wore 31 gold oyster-shells as a necklace and a larger single oyster shaped amulet. Queen Mereret owned three large gold oyster-shell pendants, two of them inlaid on the upper surface.

In the 1920s, archaeologists excavated tombs near Babylon of Sumerian royalty from ancient Mesopotamia. Part of the treasure were several wooden ornaments and musical instruments inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

The silver lyre of Ur, pictured, found in one of the graves, dates back to between 2,600 and 2,400 B.C. This predecessor to the modern harp, was found in the Great Death Pit accompanied by 70 men and women buried with their Queen. Miraculously well persevered, the lyre was entirely covered in sheet silver and inlaid with mother-of-pearl patterns. The silver cow's head front has inlaid eyes of shell and lapis lazuli, and the edges, borders and plaques of the sound box are inlaid with mother-of-pearl

Sumerian artisans cut a design from the shell, carved the same form out of the wooden setting, and filled the spaces of the engraving with bitumen, which after acting as glue hardened forming the background. Inlaying like this was used throughout Asia and Asia-Minor up to the time of the Ottoman Empire, and although refined, the same principles are still practiced by artisans in Turkey and Egypt


The early Egyptians would have traded the oysters from the Red Sea which even in much later times was known as dangerous waters. Divers were often taken by sharks, lost limbs to sword fish or were caught underwater by giant clams. Slaves were brought east from Africa to fish. These would have been Gulf Pearl Oysters, the Pinctada radiata from which mother-of-pearl could be made into ornaments. The word nacre comes from the Arabic word Naqqarah, meaning shell, so linguistically, we deduce, oysters and pearls were part of the culture long before Greece or Rome. In Europe the original word for as small pearl, a margaret, derives also from the Persian murwari being a child of light and stays with us in Italian as Margherita or Rita, in French as Marguerite, Margot and Groten; in German Margarethe, Gretchen and Grethel, in English Margaret, Marjorie, Madge, Maggie, Peggy etc.

The Red Sea, BC 7th century

In the middle east, this account is credited to the 7th century BC from an unnamed Phoenician traveller in Persia who came across fishermen diving for pearls.

“What struck me more in this country is the fishing of pearls . I once had the chance of seeing these pearl fishers at work, off the coasts of the countless islands around the Persian coast. There were at least one hundreds of small boats, each of them carrying 10 pearl divers. They were good divers, capable of staying under water for the time necessary to fill up a bag of oysters, which they removed from the sea-bed with their bare fingers. Then they jumped back onto the deck and started the proceeding all over again.

The owner of each boat opened feverishly the oysters. A swift glance and then he threw them away without even thinking that he could eat them. Unless he found inside a pearl! In that case he removed it gently with the tip of the knife and put it into a bag with a smile as big as the pearl itself. When the sun was halfway between the zenith and the horizon, other boats arrived on the spot with dozens of brokers who chose and set the price for the pearls previously picked, considering their sizes, their roundness, and their light. Those people were the ones that subsequently resold the pearls on the market of Persepoli.”

The immortal maiden

In the east, mother-of-pearl found its way into rings and necklaces, was inlaid into vanity mirrors and brushes, and in later centuries into Chinese and Korean furniture.

As Buddhism spread to Korea and Japan – both also oyster countries - China became a magnet for mariners and merchants wanting to sell and buy,

In Tao legend Ho-Hsien-Ku was instructed in a vision that if she ate the mother-of-pearl shells she found on the mountain she would become immortal. She was said to float from peak to peak until finally she disappeared and hence became known as the The Immortal Maiden. She is also that rare species - a woman featuring in an otherwise male dominated philosophy. For the Tao the ground up pearl was often seen as a route to fasting and the everlasting. Old potions ground them with pumice, honeycomb, serpent’s gall and malt.

Derivations have seeped through into Chinese pharmacy where powdered mother-of-pearl is prescribed to reduce heart palpitations, dizziness, and high blood pressure. Very similar ideas have also been found in Peru.

How a pearl is formed

Not all mother-of-pearl, of course, is derived from oysters. Of more than 8,000 species of mollusc less than 20 are considered reliable sources for pearls. Some are edible but usually it is flesh or shell. Most molluscs produce nacre – a mix of calcium carbonate and conchiolin – to create their shells, even the humble mussel (which in Mississippi would be turned into shirt buttons right up to the last century) but more usually for workable mother-of-pearl it is abalone oysters, green, paua or red abalone, the silver or gold lipped oyster, the ayoka oyster, or the Ceylon oyster (pictured), all of which secrete more copious and valued fluid. The nacre forms to fight off an invading irritant such as a parasite or a food-particle by smothering it.

The value of a pearl is determined by the finesse and regularity of the crystals formed in this process. The number of layers formed will give the orb lustre and iridescence.

In warm waters – around 30 C - as in the Pacific, the oyster metabolism increases and they grow faster and secrete more nacre, but the layers are thick and not as translucent and the crystal structure is not perfect resulting in a duller, less lustrous mother-of-pearl. So the great oyster eating areas like the Chesapeake Bay in north America have barely ever seen a pearl formed, but further south in the Mississippi huge caches have been found in ancient burial tombs.

Ideally, when temperatures are lower – around 16C - the oyster metabolism is slower, and it produces the nacre more slowly. These nacre layers are thinner and the crystal structure more even, resulting in an increased translucency and higher value. Even now, dealers will test a pearl by rolling it on their tongue to see if it is real or artificial – artificial pearls are completely round.

The colours of the pearl derive from the shades of plankton that the oysters filter in the water and so in a way are a photocopy of the micro plankton on which they feed.

Hence the pearls of the south seas are black or green. The crystal is orthorhombic, meaning it has three triangular sides, which act as tiny prisms. It is the interaction of light with these tiny prisms in the pearl that create the quality referred to as orient.

The prized south sea oyster Pinctada margaritefera can secret three or four layers of aragonite each day. Over a two-year life cycle, some 2,000 layers will have been deposited, each one about one micron or 0.001 mm thick.

The Italian director Federico Fellini commented aptly: “All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography”. You could also say the pearl is also mankind biography.

Pliny's misconceit

A beautifully poetic ancient Arab narrative suggests that pearls are created by the oyster sipping the moonlight dew off the surface of the water.

Curiously this literary myth assumed a credibility and plausibility in early texts, which carried on right up into the middle of the second millennia. The Roman savant Pliny in his Historia Naturalis repeated the whimsy as if it were scientific fact. He even suggested the colour of a pearl was down to the weather.

”If the dew is pure and clear, then are the pearls are white, faire and orient…but if grosse and troubled, the pearls likewise are dim, foul and duskish…”

In such awe were his words held that no one it seemed wanted to contradict him for more than 1500 years. Middle Age manuscripts followed this idea unquestioningly, which perhaps is a sign of the cloistered distance between the literate and the water. It was the first Europeans exploiting the oyster beds of the Americas who realised that it was “some old philosopher’s conceit”, as Richard Hawkins put it. Scientifically, Anselmus de Boot was the first to argue in 1600 that the pearl was generated from the nacre inside of the shell. Even this would have to wait a further century before the physicist Reaumnur could prove it satisfactorily with the advent of the microscope.

The misconception is the more strange because pearls were so valued throughout early history. Possibly associations of wealth and religion allowed their mystery to go unquestioned. Certainly the early Chinese already knew that if they placed beads or tiny figurines of deities inside the soft mantle of a live oyster, the oyster would respond and coat it with the same mother-of-pearl that it used to make its own shell. These beads and carvings were then taken to the temples and offered to the gods in the hope that they would bestow good luck upon the donor. Early Chinese texts said the pearl was formed “as if by disease” which is a pretty good clue that they realised pearls came from hard objects being inserted inside the shell. A grain of sand is often quoted, but in reality it is usually something larger and less likely to be dislodged. The theory which had defied learned men until 4000 years was not too dissimilar from the principles that would eventually be adopted in Ayuga Bay, Japan and patented in by Kokichi Mikimoto and Tsauhei Mire in 1906 for the cultivation of artificial pearls.

The gates of heaven

In every civilisation, there is always some pre-history of gods, of legends, of larger than life ancestors, of indeterminate, ghostly pre-life. The oyster has always managed to associate with such illustrious company. Gods, mighty warriors, heroes, beautiful sirens, fearsome, lithe, fire breathing creatures, fantastical epics, glorious kings and queens…the oyster has been an iconic must-have in the myths of great wealth and devil-fearing, in different manifestations whatever the religion, whatever part of the world, whatever the century even.. Oysters were in essence an idea. And that idea is most potent with the miracle of the pearl.

Revered not just through centuries, but across millennia, continents and cultures, the pearl has enjoyed the ultimate social status, notwithstanding, or possibly because of the enormous cruelty and endeavour that has been associated with its discovery and gathering. Almost of equal significance, and in some cases value, also has been the mother-of-pearl from which it is formed.

In the Bible the gates of heaven are each made from a single pearl. In Genesis God gives Adam and Eve coats as “beautiful as pearls”.

The pearl is enshrined in the Koranic description of Paradise:

"The stones are pearls and jacinths; the fruits of the trees are pearls and emeralds; and each person admitted to the delights of the celestial kingdom is provided with a tent of pearls, jacinths, and emeralds; is crowned with pearls of incomparable lustre, and is attended by beautiful maidens resembling hidden pearls."

The jacinth is red or purple, possibly a hyacinth but often used to describe gems and stones of the same colour.

Much earlier still, the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabbarata both talk of pearls. The Ramayana tells of a necklace of 27 orbs and says pearl drillers were drafted to travel with the army. Krishna dragged a pearl from the ocean to give to his daughter Pandaia for her wedding.

Further east in China, the earliest of books the Shu King dating as early as 2350 BC says that in the 23rd century BC Yu was given pearls from the river Hwai. Another source around 2800BC says pearls came from the Shen-si province on the western frontier. A man sized sculpture of an open mouthed dragon made completely from oyster shells was unearthed nearby at a Hou-kang Yang-shao in Honan. It has been dated to 4460BC.

Perfect as the moon

“Light filtered down through the water to the bed where the frilly pearl oysters lay fastened to the rubbly bottom…this was the bed that had raised the king of Spain to be a great power in Europe, had helped to pay for his wars, and had decorated his churches for his soul’s sake…

“Kino lifted the flesh and there it lay, the great pearl perfect as the moon. It captured the light and refined it and gave it back in silver incandescence…on the surface he could see dreams form.”

John Steinbeck, The Pearl 1944