CaratA royal brooch made 23,750 pounds at Elmwood's; a 1927 feather made 75,000
The Verdura unicorn brooch from Queen Elizabeth II's lady-in-waiting drew the coverage at Elmwood's 19 August sale. Three other lots sold for more, and a Van Cleef feather brooch made 3.16 times as much.
§1A unicorn, a countess, and fifty years at the palace.
Elmwood's Auctioneers sold a Verdura unicorn-head brooch for 23,750 pounds, or $32,400, at its London sale of 19 August, reported by Rapaport on 24 August. The brooch carries about 1.10 carats of diamonds in a pear-shaped fringe, a diamond-set horn and a brilliant-cut stone, under a circular cabochon turquoise crown, and it was made by Fulco di Verdura. Its provenance is why it travelled. It belonged to Virginia Fortune Ryan Ogilvy, dowager countess of Airlie, who was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II for close to fifty years.
§2Three lots in the same report sold for more.
That is the piece the coverage led with, and it is the cheapest of the four lots the same report names. An Art Deco diamond feather brooch by Van Cleef and Arpels, dated 1927, made 75,000 pounds, or $102,229. An Art Deco Egyptian Revival tiara made 65,000 pounds, or $88,595. A Cartier tutti frutti brooch from around 1940 made 60,000 pounds, or $81,780. The Van Cleef feather made 3.16 times what the royal brooch made, this desk's division of the two figures. A sale headline that puts the palace piece at the front is describing attention rather than price, and the same article carries the numbers that say so.
The palace sells the story. The 1927 feather sells for more.
§3The conversions reconcile to one rate.
The dollar figures reconcile against a single rate, which is worth checking before any of them is set beside an American result. Dividing each dollar figure by its sterling figure returns 1.36305 on the Van Cleef, 1.36300 on the tiara, 1.36300 on the Cartier and 1.36421 on the Verdura. That is one conversion near $1.363 to the pound applied across the sale, the fourth differing only by rounding on the smallest number, rather than four separately struck prices. The four named lots together make 223,750 pounds, or $305,004. Elmwood's published no total for the sale in the report this desk read, so what share those four represent cannot be stated, and it is not stated here.
What the provenance bought is visible if the brooch is priced as jewellery rather than as history. About 1.10 carats of diamonds and a turquoise cabochon, in a signed Verdura mount, returned $29,455 for each carat of diamond content.
No parcel of 1.10 carats of small pear and brilliant cut goods approaches that figure anywhere in the trade, so nearly the whole price is the name and the countess, in a proportion this desk cannot split from a single result. The honest reading is that Verdura plus a fifty-year royal household attachment was worth 23,750 pounds on the day, and a 1927 Van Cleef feather with no comparable story attached was worth three times more.
Royal provenance sells newspapers more reliably than it sells jewellery, and this sale demonstrates it cleanly because both halves of the evidence sit in one report. The lot with the palace connection led every write-up and finished fourth of four on price. The lot that finished first was a signed Art Deco brooch from a house whose 1920s work has been bid up for a decade with no story attached at all.
For anyone consigning estate goods this autumn, the practical point is that a documented provenance is worth having and is not worth pricing off. The room that wants the countess is smaller than the room that wants the 1927 Van Cleef.
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