The 60-year career of jeweller Elizabeth Gage is chronicled in a new book

Sixty years and counting. That is how long Elizabeth Gage has been creating jewellery and, in that time, she has become one of Britain’s most enduringly successful goldsmiths and designers.

Bold in form, scale and colour, her aesthetic has always been unmistakable. With a passion for the past, she blends historical references – everything from ancient Greek coins to medieval pageantry – with a love of vibrant gemstones. Cornflower-blue sapphires, fiery orange-mandarin garnets and lime-green peridots are just a handful of the gems that she sets in sculptural designs of rich yellow gold, which more likely than not are embellished with engraving, enamel and her signature wire-twist-wire edges.

The result is bold but harmonious and, over the years, she has attracted a legion of dedicated fans, including Jackie Kennedy and Lauren Bacall. She reinvents historic forms and techniques with a modern sensibility, and a newly published book, Elizabeth Gage: A Life in Jewellery, demonstrates just how much she was ahead of her time on multiple fronts.

Born in 1937 in London to a wealthy upper-class family, childhood illness restricted her freedom. Confined to bed, her creation of clothes and houses for her dolls was an early demonstration of artistic dexterity and unfettered imagination, qualities she shared with her mother and grandmother, both painters.

She later rejected finishing school, the standard route for young women of her class and generation, in favour of studying at the-then Chelsea School of Art. It was a chance experience, however, at the British Museum in the early 1960s that set her on an entirely different creative path.

Coming across a display of ancient Roman rings, she was immediately drawn to their beauty and buttery golden patina, and they led her to enrol at London’s Sir John Cass College. Six years of mastering the art of goldsmithing at the bench followed and it was not long afterwards, in 1968, that she received her first major commission, from Cartier New York.

Despite being a woman very much in a man’s world at that time, she possessed the single-minded creative vision and determination to succeed, and her original designs and exceptional craftsmanship attracted a following among newly liberated women who were seeking to express their own individuality and inner strength.

Gage’s output has been remarkably consistent over the decades. A set of jewellery in the permanent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she has long been a patron, is testament to that. A 1967 brooch, which features a diagonal cross of grey baroque pearls at its centre, is set with five carved black seals of steatite, or soapstone, which Gage discovered in Crete while working there early on in her career. Over the years, she created earrings (1970) and a necklace (1988) to match and they became treasured pieces in her own personal collection.

Elizabeth Gage: A Life in Jewellery by William Grant (£50, ACC Art Books)