Bulgari

Restraining Order on Auction from Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher Divorce

Michelle

Recently I saw an Instagram Ad by the company Invaluable, about looking at some of their auction pieces. They picked a few pieces from the estate of Elvis Presley to display to me. I have looked at some of Presley’s estate pieces on auction before. I looked at the auction in total and saw an interesting article from the past, a restraining order given to Eddie Fisher by Elizabeth Taylor! A little bit of research had me discovering that 55 years ago this month Taylor and Fisher were finally divorced. The exact date is March 6, 1954.

I’m going to look at some of the jewels Eddie Fisher bought for his second wife, Elizabeth Taylor. The story behind the … Read the rest

Skinner Fine Jewelry Auction: June 2017 Analysis

Michelle

Back for part two of my analysis of the Skinner Fine Jewelry Auction of June 2017. If you missed my highlights from the Susan Freeman collection that was a part of the June fine jewelry auction, click here.

The results are in! This article will look at how Freeman’s collection of % sold did against the other items in the Skinner auction for this year and last year. Then I will look at what the regular items did by category and see the bottom 6 and top 6 of the auction.

This year versus last year

In my last analysis, we saw that the lots sold were 68% and unsold were 32 % for the Freeman collection. Below a … Read the rest

Revival Jewelry: Highlights from the Boston Exhibit

Michelle

Spring will be here next month but while the weather is still deciding to go back to winter or move forward to warmer weather you can take in a new jewelry exhibit that has come to Boston. This new exhibit is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I signed up for a lecture last week to coincide with the new exhibit. The new exhibit is on revival jewelry. I was telling my dad about the lecture and the new exhibit when he asked ‘what is revival jewelry?’ My short answer was that is jewelry that is copied or inspired by jewelry from the past. Revival jewelry has a lot more history to it. I want to show highlights … Read the rest

Hidden Treasures of the Romanovs

Michelle

Cover

Conspiracy theories, revolts, grandeur, murder and cover ups are only the start to describe a book that explains how some of the Russian family jewels were saved! It is a relatively short book of 143 pages of text, the drawback at first glance is the few photos and even fewer colored photos in this book. The way the book started out also caused some early doubts about how good the book would be. I didn’t really have any set notions about how the story should go but the intro talking about the unmarked grave in Paris of a man I never heard of in all my reading on Russian Royal History caught me off guard. The photo of him (only … Read the rest

Emeralds at Auction

Michelle

May is almost over and there are only a few more major auctions before summer is here. So before May ends I want to look at the emeralds that went on auction in the 2015-2016 season. Emeralds are the birthstone for May but they are also the stones for celebrating a 20th or 35th anniversary.  The interesting meaning behind emeralds is that they are called the ‘Stone of Successful Love’. ‘Emerald promotes friendship, balance between partners, and is particularly known for providing domestic bliss, contentment and loyalty. It was dedicated in the ancient world to the goddess Venus for its ability to insure security in love’.(CrystalVaults)

I will look at 4 auction houses: Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Bonhams, and Skinner. … Read the rest