loquet

Locket derives from the Old French loquet (a latch, a small lock), the diminutive of loc (lock), which came from the Frankish *luk or the Old English locc (lock, bar). The word first appeared in English in the fourteenth century meaning any small hinged case. Its specialization into a piece of jewelry — a hinged pendant containing a portrait, a lock of hair, or a keepsake — happened gradually through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The portrait locket reached its peak during the reign of Elizabeth I. Nicholas Hilliard, the queen's miniaturist, painted watercolor portraits on vellum small enough to fit inside hinged pendants. The Armada Jewel, a locket given by Elizabeth to Sir Thomas Heneage around 1588, holds a Hilliard miniature of the queen on one side and a scene of a ship on the other. These were intimate objects — carried against the body, opened in private.

Mourning lockets became common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A lock of the deceased's hair was placed inside, sometimes woven into an elaborate design. Queen Victoria wore a locket containing Prince Albert's hair for the remaining forty years of her life after his death in 1861. The locket was the nineteenth century's answer to the photograph — a portable, private, body-carried image of someone absent or dead.

Photography both completed and killed the portrait locket. Daguerreotype lockets appeared in the 1840s — suddenly anyone, not just the wealthy, could carry a portrait. But as photography became universal, the locket's intimacy faded. A photograph in a wallet replaced a miniature in a locket. The object that was once the most personal piece of jewelry became a vintage curiosity.