The Jewel Casket

The Jewel Casket, painted in 1900, depicts a young woman examining or selecting from a casket of jewels—a subject that combined the pleasures of the classical setting with the more intimate feminine world of adornment and self-presentation. Godward's jewel subjects gave him the additional pictorial challenge of rendering the varied materials of precious stones and metal alongside his customary marble and fabric, expanding the range of surface textures within his typically restricted material vocabulary. The jewel casket as a prop also introduced a note of narrative activity into the compositional stillness that characterized most of his work.

The jewel casket and its contents provide Godward with an opportunity to render the varied optical properties of precious materials—the reflected light of metal, the transparency of stones, the matte surface of carved ivory—alongside his standard marble and fabric textures. Each material is treated with the individual precision that characterized his approach to depicted surfaces.