Carat£59,000 in Penzance: a steel Patek beats its low estimate 11.8 times
A stainless Calatrava reference 448, found during a Cornish house clearance, sold at Hansons on 25 August against a £5,000 to £10,000 estimate. The winning bid came by telephone from Hong Kong.
§1A jewellery box in Camborne.
A stainless steel Patek Philippe and Co Calatrava, reference 448, sold for £59,000 at Hansons Cornwall in Penzance on 25 August. The watch was found in a jewellery box during a house clearance in Camborne after the owner's death, and had passed within the same family for decades as a gift from a grandmother to her husband. The auctioneer records serial number 822731 and case number 610667, and dates the watch to the 1930s. The buyer bid by telephone from Hong Kong. The result was picked up by the trade press on 31 August and 1 September.
§2Both bounds, and two dollar figures.
The estimate was £5,000 to £10,000. Against the lower bound the result is 11.8 times. Against the upper bound it is 5.9 times, and both figures belong in the record, because quoting only the first is how a saleroom result turns into a headline rather than a number. The dollar equivalents reported around the sale do not agree with one another: National Jeweler carried $79,892 and the syndicated wire copy carried $78,765 for the same £59,000, implying conversion rates of 1.3541 and 1.3350. This paper prints the pound, which is the currency the sale was struck in. None of the reports state whether £59,000 is the hammer price or includes the buyer's premium.
§3The scarcity argument is the auctioneer's.
The scarcity argument belongs to the auctioneer and it is the ordinary one for this material. Hansons' senior valuer put the interest down to how few stainless steel watches Patek Philippe made in the period, which leaves surviving examples thin on the ground. The house also reports that the watch was still running when it arrived, after roughly nine decades in one Cornish family. Bidding is described as international, with competition from Japan and China before the telephone line from Hong Kong took it.
§4An empty stretch of the calendar.
The result lands in an unusually empty stretch of the calendar, which is worth stating rather than glossing. This desk checked the salerooms this morning.
Sotheby's next jewellery sales are The Gem Drop in New York from 14 to 17 September and High Jewelry in Hong Kong on 17 September. Bonhams closed jewellery sales on 1 and 2 September and publishes no totals for either. A £59,000 lot from a regional Cornish room is, at present, the most substantial dated jewellery or watch auction figure available to print anywhere in the trade.
The number worth carrying out of Penzance is not £59,000, it is £5,000. That was a professional valuation on a watch that made almost twelve times it, which says the reference material for mid-century steel Patek is thinner than the estimate assumed. A jeweller holding estate stock, or writing valuations off a book more than a year or two old, should read this as a pricing problem rather than as a good story about a lucky family. The stock in the back room is being valued against the same tables that produced the £5,000.
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