Bonhams runs 112 lots online and 175 live inside eight days
Weekly: Jewelry closes in Los Angeles on 25 August with 112 lots. Modern Native American Art and Jewelry follows live on 26 August with 175. Both counts are read from the house's own listing.
By The Auctions Desk
What changed
Bonhams has two jewellery sales open for bidding in Los Angeles inside eight days. Weekly: Jewelry is an online sale running from 18 to 25 August with 112 lots. Modern Native American Art and Jewelry is a live sale on 26 August with 175 lots.
What it means
- The auction jewellery market that gets written about is four trophy nights a year, and the auction jewellery market that actually sets prices for ordinary secondhand goods runs every week at a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a lot and is almost never covered. A jeweller taking in an estate lot, or valuing a customer's inherited bracelet, is working against the second market and reading about the first.
- Two sales, 287 lots, eight days, one city. There is no headline in that and there is a great deal of price information, and it will be published within a week of the hammer, which is more than can currently be said for the houses that sell the famous stones.
Key figures
| lots, Weekly: Jewelry, closes 25 Aug | 112 |
|---|---|
| lots, live sale, 26 August | 175 |
| lots in eight days, one city | 287 |
| results published so far | 0 |
Source: Bonhams Los Angeles
Two sales, 287 lots, eight days
Both counts and both dates are read from Bonhams' own Los Angeles listing rather than from a calendar aggregator, which matters because the aggregator entry for this series currently resolves to a February 2025 edition of the same sale. Neither sale has a result yet and this is a calendar note.
The weekly online format is the least discussed part of the auction jewellery business and by some distance the most frequent.
It runs continuously, it is priced for the volume end rather than the trophy end, and previous editions have carried branded retail names alongside unsigned gold: the February 2025 edition of the same series offered work by Paloma Picasso for Tiffany, Valentin Magro, Gübelin, Gucci and Ippolita, in a band running from about $100 to $4,000, with the strongest lots settling near $5,000.
That band is cited here as a description of a prior edition of the series, not of the sale now open, because Bonhams has published no estimate range for the current one that this desk could verify.
Two Bonhams jewellery sales, Los Angeles · lots
Source: Bonhams Los Angeles
The weekly format nobody covers
The live sale on 26 August is a different business. Modern Native American Art and Jewelry is a specialist category with its own collector base, in which named makers carry the value and the jewellery is bought as art rather than as gold. It is also a story this paper has now examined three times.
On 17 August this desk killed a version of it that described the sale as a past April auction with a misattributed top lot. Bonhams' own listing now shows a live Los Angeles sale on 26 August 2026 with 175 lots, which settles the date question that killed it.
A lot-level estimate reported elsewhere for a Jesse Monongya necklace could not be verified against the house's own catalogue this morning and is therefore not printed here.
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| Modern Native American, Live 26 Aug | 175 lots |
| Weekly: Jewelry, Online To 25 Aug | 112 lots |
| Weekly: Jewelry, As The Bureau Filed It | 48 lots, corrected |
Notes on this table
Both live counts read from Bonhams' own Los Angeles listing on 21 August 2026. This paper's Bureau filed the weekly sale at 48 lots; the house says 112, and the house's figure is printed. The aggregator entry for this series currently resolves to a February 2025 edition of the same sale, which is why the house's own page was used. Carat Capital graphics desk.
The volume end is the transparent end
Set against the other end of the market, the useful thing about both sales is that they will produce numbers. This paper reported on 17 August that Sotheby's had closed three jewellery sales without publishing a total for any of them, one of them thirty-two days earlier.
Bonhams runs a weekly online jewellery sale that resolves in seven days and posts what things made. The volume end of the auction business is currently more transparent than the premium end, which is the reverse of what a reader would assume.
One correction of this paper's own record belongs here: our Bureau filed the Weekly: Jewelry sale at 48 lots. The house's listing says 112, and the house's figure is the one printed.
The story so far
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Method
Both live counts read from Bonhams' own Los Angeles listing on 21 August 2026. This paper's Bureau filed the weekly sale at 48 lots; the house says 112, and the house's figure is printed. The aggregator entry for this series currently resolves to a February 2025 edition of the same sale, which is why the house's own page was used.