A gem

By Isabel Lloyd

South Africa, three million years ago. An Australopith, a distant, red-pelted relation of man’s earliest ancestors, lopes along by some long-forgotten riverside. He – or she, or it – sees something glimmering under the water: a large pebble of a reddish-brown mineral distant descendants will call jasperite. He, or she, or it, picks the pebble up and takes it back home to their cave. Why? Because, according to the anthropologist Raymond Dart, who will find the pebble millennia later, in 1924, it has three indentations that together look like two eyes and a mouth. The “face” may have occurred naturally, or may have been chipped in. Either way, Dart claims it as the earliest example of art: because the creature that owned the pebble saw it represented something more than just itself.

Paris, October 2013. The JAR jewellery store. A small, square room, the walls lined floor to ceiling with dusty velvet, the carpet a faded bois de rose; padded screens covered in the same faded colour block the light from outside. Nothing in here is either shiny or new. At one end is a Chesterfield sofa upholstered in scratched, dark-green leather; behind it and to one side, paintings and drawings (a beautiful youth sketched in sienna ink, a huge black-and-white photo of a toreador, an oil of three blown peonies) are stacked against the walls. Opposite is a plain, rectangular wooden desk. Its centre is clear, apart from a varnished-pine hand-mirror. But at either end it is crenellated with small, talismanic objects. A toy London bus. Ceramic rabbits. A lump of lapis lazuli. Three glass paperweights. Two model terrapins. A ridged lump of coral. A cream porcelain flower. A block of Perspex inlaid with several strands of glowing, red-gold hair. A plain pebble that looks a bit like a face.