Jewellery

Martel Maides of St Peter Port, Guernsey offered a single-strand pearl necklace for sale with a £1500-2000 estimate on the assumption they were natural saltwater pearls – the highest bidder reserving the right to send them for laboratory testing prior to settling the bill.

Despite countless offers to leave France, Suzanne Belperron (1900-83) remained in German-occupied Paris throughout the Second World War – a jewellery maker and a Resistance fighter.

Was this the ring of the Tiger of Mysore, taken from his body when he was killed in battle?

The run on pearls continues with two spectacular prices paid for exceptional natural saltwater gems at auctions on either side of the Atlantic this week.

Sotheby’s have had to buy back the 59.60 carat flawless fancy vivid pink diamond they sold in Geneva last November for a world record $83m.

Salisbury Museum is hoping to host a remarkable hoard of Bronze Age jewellery in a new gallery set to open this summer.

This Art Deco 18ct gold Egyptian Revival gem-set winged scarab brooch with rose-cut diamonds will appear in the Antique & Modern Jewellery sale being held by Fellows of Birmingham.

Optimism permeated the UK’s regional auction market across much of the last year.

The annual Christmas Present sale held by George Kidner at their saleroom in Lymington included this French Art Deco ruby and diamond-set brooch or jabot pin.

A Victorian diamond rivière necklace sold to an anonymous bidder for £190,000 at Duke’s of Dorchester earlier this month.

This cased Austro-Hungarian gold and enamel brooch/pendant with a diamond-set monogram and coronet was the gift of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Mary Marshall, the head housekeeper at Welbeck Abbey, country residence of the Dukes of Portland, from the 1890s until her retirement in 1923.

When, in 1854, William Holman Hunt decided to leave England to further his religious painting in Syria, John Everett Millais was distraught at the prospect of losing the only friend he entirely trusted.

The Jane Austen’s House Museum at Chawton in Hampshire has raised the £150,000 needed to keep a gold turquoise ring once owned by Jane Austen in the country.

An appeal to keep in the UK a ring once owned by Jane Austen received an anonymous £100,000 donation just days after it was launched.

The British government has placed a temporary export bar on a rare piece of jewellery that belonged to Jane Austen.

At Dreweatts’ first stand-alone sale of jewellery in London this version of Salvador Dalí’s ‘The Eye Of Time’ (El Ojo Del Tempo) brooch sold for £75,000.

Pearls and coloured stones remain strong – but, fuelled by interest from China (and, to a lesser, extent, the Middle East), so does amber.

A single pearl-drop earring worn by Charles I at his execution in 1649, a maharaja’s coat richly embroidered with pearls c.1870, and a necklace of cultured pearls given to Marilyn Monroe by Joe DiMaggio in 1954 – all part of an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum this autumn.

One hestitates to contradict the great metaphysical poetic and theologian John Donne who believed that ‘death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes’.

This Arts and Crafts ecclesiastical ring was made by Sybil Dunlop (1889-1968) for Arthur Winnington-Ingham, Bishop of London from 1901-39.