Joel Arthur Rosenthal is an American

jeweller A bench jeweler is an artisan who uses a combination of skills to make and repair jewelry. Some of the more common skills that a bench jeweler might employ include antique restoration, silversmithing, goldsmithing, stone setting, engraving, ...

who works in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

where he founded the fine jewelry firm JAR. He has been called "the Faberge of our time."

Early life

Born in 1943 in the Bronx, Joel Arthur Rosenthal is the only son of a postman and a teacher in biology. He spent a semester at City College of New York studying linguistics; he speaks French, Italian, English and Yiddish. He then transferred to Harvard University, where he studied art history and philosophy, graduating in 1966. He then moved to Paris where he worked as a screenwriter, then as a needle-stitcher, opening a small shop. He experimented with unusually colored

yarn Yarn is a long continuous length of interlocked fibres, used in sewing, crocheting, knitting, weaving, embroidery, ropemaking, and the production of textiles. '' Thread'' is a type of yarn intended for sewing by hand or machine. Modern ...

. Its clientele included designers from

Hermès Hermès International S.A. ( , ) is a French Luxury goods, luxury fashion house established in 1837. It specializes in leather goods, silk goods, lifestyle accessories, home furnishings, perfumery, jewelry, watches and ready-to-wear. Since the ...

and Valentino. Rosenthal one day was asked if he could design a mount for a gemstone. That sent his career in a new direction.

Career

After a short stint as a salesman in the New York store of

Bulgari Bulgari (, ; stylized as BVLGARI) is an Italian luxury fashion house founded in 1884 and known for its jewellery, watches, fragrances, accessories, and leather goods. Headquartered in Rome, the company was acquired by the French conglomera ...

, he returned to Paris in 1977 and began designing pieces there from affordable materials, such as

coral Corals are colonial marine invertebrates within the subphylum Anthozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They typically form compact Colony (biology), colonies of many identical individual polyp (zoology), polyps. Coral species include the important Coral ...

, moonstone and minute colored

diamond Diamond is a Allotropes of carbon, solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Diamond is tasteless, odourless, strong, brittle solid, colourless in pure form, a poor conductor of e ...

. Quick success led the self-taught Rosenthal to open a non-descript salon at 7 Place Vendôme, where he still hosts his loyal clients. His company, JAR, has no shop window or sign on the street. The entry is made on the sponsorship of a known customer and for persons whose name excludes any ambiguity. Each piece is unique, created for a specific client; his yearly output is a scant 70-80 pieces. He takes inspiration from the fauna and flora for his creations, mixing references from the past with current techniques of jewelry. What Rosenthal has been doing since 1977 is setting gems in pavé arrangements as fine as needlepoint stitches, frequently amplifying the stones' colors by mounting them in a blackened alloy. In 1994, JAR made a Parrot Tulip bangle of gold, with diamond and garnet accents, that sold at auction in 2014 for 3.25 million Swiss francs. In 2002, the first public exhibition devoted to JAR was held in London. The 400 pieces presented, mostly lent by their owners, were arranged in full black, the visitors having to use a flashlight to observe them. On this occasion JAR published the only book on his works, JAR Paris, a catalog of 720 pages printed in a limited number of copies.Vanity Fair feature on Rosenthal
Retrieved May 19, 2017 His only other public exhibition was at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. Rosenthal is the only living "artist of gems" to have had a solo show at New York's

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...

. In 2017, Rosenthal created his first piece of Judaica for the exhibition Menorah: Worship, History, Legend, co-sponsored by the

Vatican Vatican may refer to: Geography * Vatican City, an independent city-state surrounded by Rome, Italy * Vatican Hill, in Rome, namesake of Vatican City * Ager Vaticanus, an alluvial plain in Rome * Vatican, an unincorporated community in the ...

and the Jewish Museum of Rome. It was the sole work commissioned for the exhibition and his first work not meant for a collector, "but, to be seen out there."

"It was unexpected," he said of being a part of the exhibition. "I have done all I could to shield myself from what's going on in the world" — and this show, with its message of unity, was a clear (if gentle) statement about what is going on the world. "But I was confident because of what it is and where it was going."

References

External links

Images of RosenthalPhotos of JAR jewelry
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rosenthal, Joel 1943 births Living people Artists from the Bronx Artists from Paris American expatriates in France 21st-century American jewellers Jewish American artists Harvard University alumni 21st-century American Jews