Florence Koehler

Florence Koehler (1861 – 1944) was an American craftswoman, designer and jeweler. She was one of the best-known jewelers of the Arts and Crafts movement that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Biography Florence Cary was born on November 8, 1861 in Jackson, Michigan to Harriet (née Banker) and Benjamin F. Cary. They moved to Chicago where she exhibited her ceramics at the World's Columbian Exposition. She briefly ran an interior decorating business out of the Marshall Field and Company Building with her friend Mrs. E. W. Sheridan. She also taught china painting to women from the Atlan Ceramic Art Club in the 1890s and was credited with turning the club's technical gifts "to a rare standard of beauty, excellence, and originality." She traveled to London in March 1898, where she studied enamelwork and jewelry with Alexander Fisher. Koehler left her possessions to Sharpe, who arranged a posthumous exhibition of her work in 1948. Collections of her jewelry and paintings were donated to the Rhode Island School of Design and Everson Museum of Art, respectively. Her "leafy designs set with informal groupings of gems in 18-carat gold" earned her an international reputation. Art critic Roger Fry praised her work, writing in The Burlington Magazine in 1910 that "t is in the imaginative and definitely poetic quality that Mrs. Koehler's jewellery marks such an important moment in the modern revival of craftsmanship."