Bakelite and brass Jean Painlevé seahorse pendant

Again, not much time to do big flea markets, so instead I went to a small one a few streets from where I live. I didn t expect much of it, so I was really happy when I found this bakelite and brass seahorse pendant! I already have the matching earclips, so a demi parure! In the last picture you see some matching plexiglass real seahorses and fish to accompany them.
This pendant was made in the fourties, when Jean Painlevé was really popular.
Jean Painlevé (20 November 1902 – 2 July 1989) was a film director and biologist who specialized in underwater fauna. He was the son of mathematician and twice prime-minister of France, Paul Painlevé.
Painlevé first came to the cinema as an actor, alongside Michel Simon, and also as assistant director in the René Sti unfinished film L'inconnue des six jours (The Unknown Woman of Six Days), 1926. (Later, he would appear as "chief ant handler" in Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou, 1928). Soon, he was shooting his own films, starting with L'œuf d'épinoche : de la fécondation à l'éclosion, 1927.

Painlevé sometimes scored the music and background sounds for his films, such as in Les Oursins, where the collage of noise is a homage to Edgar Varese.

In order to shoot scenes underwater, Painlevé encased his camera in a custom designed waterproof box, fitted with a glass plate which allowed the camera's lens to reach through. Understandably, he spent a lot of time submerged in water.

Overall Jean Painlevé directed more than two hundred science and nature films.
He portrayed sea horses, vampire bats, skeleton shrimps, and fanworms as endowed with human traits — the erotic, the comical, and the savage. Painlevé single-handedly established a unique kind of cinema, the "scientific-poetic cinema".