Landscape ring, white and yellow gold, and diamonds, designed by Romilly Saumarez Smith and made with Lucie Gledhill, London, 2012

Ring with white gold hoop and yellow and white gold bezel. The bezel is a large horizontal white gold disc on top of which is a dense foliage composed of clusters of yellow and white gold rings and discs threaded onto wires which run through the disc and terminate in white gold roots with irregular blobs. Included in the clusters on the top of the disc are diamond beads and clusters of soldered grains.

Given by Linda L. Brownrigg

Romilly Saumarez Smith, working with Lucie Gledhill, has created this landscape ring especially for the Victoria and Albert Museum, generously funded by Linda Brownrigg.

Romilly has written a text describing how she told Lucie Gledhill the story of a family holiday in Newfoundland:

‘On the ferry from Cape Breton to Sydney I picked up a leaflet about a guesthouse in a lighthouse keeper's cottage on a small island just off the coast. We arranged to meet the boatman on a jetty at the end of the world. We stood waiting for him with our luggage. He arrived in a wooden boat with high ends like a gondola. He was taciturn and said we wouldn't be needing our bags. We put them back in the car and got into the boat. He didn't say anything else. I felt I had my family at risk, it was unnerving. The sea was very choppy beyond the harbour but suddenly became completely golden and then we saw dolphins so close and whales in the distance. We disembarked onto rocks and he [the boatman] told us we must walk for forty minutes across the island. The land that we walked on was what I wanted to tell Lucie [Gledhill] about. A lattice of black springy roots and branches supporting spongy moss and lichen and procumbent bushes pinned with cranberries and cloudberries. We walked across a fairy tale that no one had ever walked across before.

Imagine a circle of turf cut out from the ground and lifted to expose the roots underneath.’

This landscape ring was made especially for the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is a dense tangle of foliage and roots inspired by a visit to an island off Newfoundland. 'Imagine,' she writes, 'a circle of turf cut out from the ground and lifted to expose the roots underneath.'

Romilly Saumarez Smith is a leading bookbinder, represented in the V&A collections, who in the late 1990s became increasingly interested in metal and made the transition into being a jeweller. The ring has been designed by Romilly Saumarez and made with Lucie Gledhill.

M.4-2013