Silver filigree vase and handle. The vase of the bouquet holder is made of silver filigree wires extending up from the handle and leveling out at top creating an exaggerated tulip shape. The lip of the vase is jagged with pointed arches where the wires reach the top and twist down. Leaves surround the base of the vase where it meets the handle. Below this foliate border, a short length of chain attaches to a pin. The pin can be inserted through the spaces in the wire. By piercing the stems, this mechanism secured the flowers from falling out of the holder. The spindle handle of the bouquet holder is a straight and elaborately ornamented with scrolling over an intricately textured surface. Each register of the handle is decorated with different floral motifs and trailing vines made by relatively thick wires atop the fine filigree network. The handle is capped with a ball finial to which a second chain for a finger ring might have been attached. This feature would allow the bouquet holder to be worn from the finger or on a chatelaine to free the lady's hands while dancing.
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Flowers used for personal adornment were a popular, almost mandatory, fashion accessory in the nineteenth century. Small bouquets, called nosegays, posies, or tussie mussies were carried by debutantes, matrons, and girls, and they were a popular gift in the mid to late 1800s among friends and suitors. They were typically created in concentric rings of flowers, tightly wound together, and were often tied with ribbon or placed in a bouquet holder depending on the tastes and fashions. By the 1830s carrying small bouquets of flowers in decorative holders was an established fashion accessory of the upper class and royalty of Europe. These small accessories, also known as posy holders, ‘porte-bouquets’, and ‘bouquetiers’ were both decorative as well as useful. By providing a water source in the bottom of the receptacle, they were able to keep the flowers fresh throughout an occasion, and they also protected the wearer’s gloves or clothing from being stained by the plant pigments. Queen Victoria helped popularize the bouquet holder, and she is seen holding one in her portrait “Queen Victoria at the Drury Lane Theatre, November 1837” painted by E.T. Parris. When the fashion of carrying hand bouquets in decorative holders caught the fancy of the wealthy and middle class, holders were copied and mass produced in a variety of sizes, materials, and embellishments. During the second half of the nineteenth century, holders might be commissioned or purchased from the stock at a jeweler or florist shop. Few were made in the United States, instead they were usually imported from Europe and Asia. They were often given as a commemorative memento of historic encounters or events by the royalty and courts of Europe, but they were also used to celebrate and commemorate important, though less prestigious, events of the wealthy and middle class. Bouquet holders reached the peak of their popularity between the 1830s and 1880s, but it began to dwindle as bouquets of long-stemmed flowers (the latest horticultural development) loosely tied with ribbons surpassed the posy bouquet style. They were not totally out of fashion until the “Roaring Twenties,” when such objects became regarded as trivial and useless. The diversity of styles and mechanisms of bouquet holders is evidence of their longevity as a fashion accessory.
