Pointillist painters Henri Edmond Cross and Paul Signac rendered the sky’s changing colours with small, but bold touches of orange, mauve, pink, blue and yellow. For its latest high jewellery collection, titled Les Ciels de Chaumet (Chaumet’s skies), the French jeweller uses a rich treasure trove of gemstones to evoke the sky’s many moods from bright, sunny days to thunderous heavens with stormy clouds or starry nights lit by a crescent moon.

The theme allows the Maison to explore different types of colour palette, and express movement with its signature articulated “fil-couteau” (or knife-edge) setting, a technique in which the stones are mounted on extremely fine gold wire giving each piece a distinctive lightness while showcasing the gems.

The delicate technique works especially well on rippling cascades of diamonds evoking shooting stars or Japanese-inspired dancing cranes using onyx and diamonds on their large wings, holding a particularly intense “golden yellow” pear-shaped sapphire (12.78 carats) in an elegant brooch or holding a vivid pink sapphire and cornflower blue sapphire in a pair of earrings.

The Maison’s naturalistic vocabulary truly shines with designs such as three swallows in green tsavorite garnet spreading their wings in an interesting asymmetry that makes it very contemporary, as well as the interpretation a fiery sun with its yellow diamond rays seemingly suspended in the air thanks to the “fil-couteau” technique. Of particular note is the Glorious Sun tiara with a 2.51-carat cushion-cut Fancy Intense Yellow IF diamond proudly standing above 21 cabochon-cut rock crystals shaped like cloud bubbles that have been left slightly brut.

Elsewhere orange topazes, pink morganites, mandarin grenats and yellow chrysoberyls express a fiery sun, while white diamonds dominate night skies. Sketches of crescent moon aigrette from Chaumet’s archives, some of them created by Joseph Chaumet, circa the 1900s – are referenced in the Étoiles Étoiles light-as-air tiara with twinkling diamonds set in white gold.

While many of the pieces are abstract by nature, the jeweller still manages to clearly express a comet’s twinkling trail in the sky through the elegant movement of a diamond necklace dotted with a gradient of tourmalines that starts with purple and pink on one side and finishes on the other side with the incandescent blues of six Australian black opals (including one weighing an exceptional 28.11 carats).

Particularly successful is the transformable Lueurs d’Orage necklace which represents the changing sky as a storm develops with the design starting with yellow sapphires quickly moving into purple sapphires and baguette-cut onyx representing lightning bolts. The exceptional 37.68-carat, pear-shape imperial topaz at its centre is detachable and can be worn separately as a significant pendant on a long diamond chain.

The Ciels de Chaumet collection also includes several jewellery watches, amongst them, the Jumping Hour Creative Complication watches with a dial adorned with a colourful mother-of-pearl marquetry pictures a burst motif as if lightning flashes in the sky, as well as the Soleil de Feu Flying Tourbillon dials with a twirl of sapphire, spinels, mandarin garnets and diamonds dancing above a Grand Feu enamel color gradation created by renowned Swiss enameler Anita Porchet.