Few designers have shaped the visual language of Tiffany & Co. quite like Jean Schlumberger. Now, the House is turning its attention to preserving the extraordinary archive behind that legacy.
Through a new multi-year partnership with the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, The Tiffany Archives will conserve and digitally image approximately 5,000 original drawings and 5,000 archival documents, protecting the material for future generations of designers, curators and scholars.
The initiative begins with I Am Only a Pencil, a presentation staged during Paris Fashion Week 2026, that brings Schlumberger’s drawings and archival material together with the jewellery they inspired. Tiffany & Co. has also partnered with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which has provided scientific expertise for the presentation.
Schlumberger joined Tiffany & Co. in 1956, bringing with him an imagination filled with birds, flowers, sea creatures and fantastical forms. His drawings reveal the first stages of ideas that would eventually become some of the House’s most recognisable creations, translating nature into jewellery through movement, colour and wit.
I Am Only a Pencil traces that process directly. Original drawings are shown alongside archival photographs and documents before giving way to finished works, including the Hedges and Flowers, Jasmine and Tulips necklaces. Later galleries explore Schlumberger’s Surrealist-inspired objets d’art, his relationship with couture and, finally, Bird on a Rock, one of Tiffany & Co.’s most enduring designs.
Among the highlights is one of the earliest Bird on a Rock brooches, formerly owned by Schlumberger’s close friend Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon, with the famous bird perched on lapis lazuli. Elsewhere, jewels once owned by Mellon sit beside the drawings from which they emerged, narrowing the distance between an idea on paper and the finished object.
The project ultimately places as much emphasis on the archive as the jewels themselves. By conserving the fragile paper works and making them more accessible, Tiffany & Co. and its partners are ensuring that Schlumberger’s imagination remains something to be studied, revisited and reinterpreted — not simply admired from a distance.
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