Jewellery

The Palm Beach Show Group have announced the launch of a new fair in Miami Beach.

A rotting old caravan propped up on a farm might not sound like the kind of place you’d expect to discover a valuable family heirloom. But for a Devon-based furniture restorer, it proved just that when they found an Art Deco brooch believed to be a rare piece hiding within the contents of the van.

A medieval ring long associated with Joan of Arc sold for £240,000 – almost 30 times its estimate – at Timeline Auctions in Bloomsbury on February 25.

Sotheby’s London will be showing hundreds of previously unseen jewellery drawings in a one-off exhibition from February 18-March 8, sourced from a privately owned collection of jewellery and silver.

This gold and peacock blue enamel necklace designed by Archibald Knox sold for £31,000 at Mallams in Oxford.

The law on tiger jewellery is frequently flouted. Last week on eBay – a site that operates a ban on antique ivory – several items of big cat jewellery were on sale from UK vendors.

This silver and labradorite floral necklace designed by Georg Jensen c.1915 sold for $17,000 (£10,970) at a recent auction held by Skinner of Boston.

Bonhams of Bond Street are to sell what is perhaps the most significant collection of cameos and intaglios seen on the market for decades.

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.