Featured Necklace with glass cabs and enamel....

...is the best title I can come up with for this as I don't have a clue of its origins!. Look what I found stashed away in a little box.
It's telling me it's old but is it pretending?. Beautiful iridescent green glass cabs that would say I'm Czech but some metal ones too. Then a central glass cab with enamel inset into the glass. Looks like an Austro-Hungarian brooch I have but that has more enamel. Missing a danglie off the bottom?. Honestly, you have all worked so hard to educate me but I'm failing miserably on this one. Reverse is a bit rough and doesn't look Czech... help please.... Very dirty and needs a clean.
Thankyou

 

The chain looks older to my eye, so vintage at least if not older. Agree must be missing a dangle. It is unusual, wait for others, too.

 

It definitely has a piece missing. I think it's vintage, but not as old as it wants to be. I think it's 1930s does Victorian does Renaissance, if that makes any sense.

 

No wonder I was getting mixed messages from it!.
I was thinking last night that the chain may not be contemporary just to confuse things further?

 

It's mine. Or ought to be.

1930s Bohemian/Czech. Very nice.

 

Even with the plain back?. All my other Czech bits have that stamped fancy backing?. I've not seen the glass cabs with enamel on them either ( but I haven't seen much so that doesn't mean much!). I'll try to get a close up of the central cab. The glass has a pattern indented into in which the enamel sits.

 

Sad thing is I didn't appreciate it as interesting when I first got it, in fact I have no idea where it even came from. Last night I came across a little box I'd obviously stashed away from the OH and it was in there.

 

Not all the Czech bits have fancy backs - they'd have copied an older original.

 

It is really nice, K. Some of the flowers look India inspired.
It may not be Czech, but from that general region, using Czech glass. Maybe Hungary.
For a replacement dangle you could use a green teardrop bead with a nice beadcap that matches the focal piece.

 

So maybe I wasn't so far out. Those flowers were throwing me off. Lotus?, is that the flower I'm thinking of?.
I'll look through to see what I've got, a green glass teardrop would finish it nicely.

 

Yes, those are part of the Indian inspiration I spotted.

 

I second @Ownedbybear : Czech, Bohemian, 1920s-1930s. As I mentioned somewhere else around here, the Czech [Bohemian] c.j. production after WW I was very often not plated or minimally so on the reverse as the metals for plating were deemed too expensive to waste on it at the time. That is one sure thing you can tell a Czech/Bohemian piece from a similar Western-produced example: Western-made jewelry was plated properly on both sides.

 

To make things more confusing, a lot of modern Czech pieces made with old parts aren't plated on the back, either to mimic age/wear or because the maker cheaped out. Some of the new pieces are sold as old even though they aren't. That fancy center cab is meant to look Indian-ish too, btw.

I thought this was a 1990s piece at first; a lot of West Coast USA factories would put an antiqued brass chain on a silvery pendant to make something resembling the construction of this piece. Some of those are of course vintage now too, technically. Those were never meant to fool anyone and were signed, but sometimes the little tags fall off or have been removed and they're sometimes sold as older than they are.

 

I'm bemused at the use of the term Western.

 

Could be my eyesight, but to me the plating looks the same on both sides?

I thought possibly Hungary, because I have seen Hungarian jewellery in the same style. They are near neighbours, Hungary borders on Slovakia and Austria.

 

I must confess, I have no idea what it means in this context.
I'm probably having a stupid day.

 

@evelyb30 Right you are. In the 1990s a scandal brewed about phoney Czech jewelry, widely discussed on the c.j. boards back then. A man whose name I can't recall but it was short and possibly Germanic in origin [and likely fake too] started to sell a very large lot of stamped and cast c.j. with glass stones, rhinestones, on online auctions, incl. ze big one we all know.

The pieces were only plated on the front, some had no pins to close the brooches, and they were unfinished, not polished smooth on the edges. The seller claimed it was all genuine Czech/Bohemian.

The pieces were genuine alright, the seller having gotten hold of a big stash of them in some mothballed old c.j. factory in Czechoslovakia.

Returns were almost 100% as c.j. collectors in the U.S., Europe, weren't impressed with unfinished jewelry no matter how genuine it was, a fact that greatly surprised the seller. He was obviously not wearing it so couldn't understand Western collectors' reluctance to appreciate his wares.

Oh, I use Western to include the North American continent and non-former Soviet block countries in Europe, it's faster than making a list.

 

Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know whether you meant the US or something else.
I know there are different ideas of Western, making it a complicated term. For instance, from a Northwestern European viewpoint the Czechs are closer to us culturally than, say, the Greeks, who were never Eastern block.
The Australians and New Zealanders are too.

 

@Any Jewelry Thank you! Yuseewhaddamean, the W list just gets longer and longer. What should belong somewhere else doesn't necessarily. I e, the Shetland Islands are closer to the coast of Norway than to Scotland to which they belong. And Hawaii is still West although located very far East if one travels from the other direction, from China and Japan, that is. So who's to say, right?

 

Right!