The quatrefoil and the flower

Roughly one clover in five thousand grows a fourth leaf, by the count of a 2017 survey of some 5.7 million clovers in six European countries. The belief that finding one brings luck is at least four hundred years old; Sir John Melton's Astrologaster of 1620 already lists it. Jacques Arpels liked to pick four-leaf clovers and give them away, and his house still repeats his line: "To be lucky, you have to believe in luck."

Van Cleef & Arpels had set clovers on clips and brooches since the 1930s. In 1968 it drew the one that would stay: a quatrefoil cut from stone and edged with a double row of gold beads, first strung on a long necklace of textured yellow gold. The Alhambra has since been recut in mother-of-pearl, onyx, malachite and carnelian, made larger and smaller, and in 2008 the beads that frame it were given a line of their own, Perlée.

Flowers had long been in the jeweller's repertoire. Enrico Grassi Damiani made a daisy for Margherita of Savoy, Queen of Italy, in the 1920s; Jeanne Toussaint clustered gold coffee beans at Cartier in 1938; Harry Winston's studio laid out its Sunflower with a compass in 1950. After 2000 the petals multiplied. Van Cleef & Arpels scattered heart-shaped ones for Frivole in 2003, Buccellati cut out its own four-petalled rosette for Opera in 2015, and Bulgari's Fiorever, in 2018, opened four gold petals round a single diamond.