Van Cleef & Arpels is one of several century-old French jewelry firms that began as small family businesses that built up international reputations as proprietors of fine polished diamonds and have since been bought out by the mega-corporation Compagnie Financiere Richemont SA.
The company was founded in the last decade of the nineteenth century by Alfred Van Cleef and his uncle Salomon Arpels, and the two first opened up a shop of their own in the first decade of the twentieth century, in Paris. Over the next ninety years, on the strength of royal commissions, the company’s reach expanded to include the rest of Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East.
Over the years, the firm has designed and manufactured a number of award-winning jewelry collections and even issued the very first watch affixed with a leather strap. But the feat it is most famous for is the perfection and popularization in the 1930s of a innovative gem setting called the Mystery Setting, in which stones are hand-grooved to fit into a mesh of gold or platinum wire.
