Really, your entire upcoming Magnificent Jewels public sale scheduled for Tuesday is type of an enormous deal, particularly coupled with the various different gross sales that Sotheby’s is staging all through December. The objective, in keeping with a press launch, is to prime $1 billion in gross sales by the top of the yr—a primary for Sotheby’s and a file for any public sale home.
With such lofty ambitions, the estimate for Louis Consolation Tiffany’s Medusa pendant ($100,000–$200,000) could appear insignificant, in comparison with, say, a few of the public sale’s coloured diamonds, all slated to fetch within the hundreds of thousands.
However the necklace’s rarity and provenance would possibly tip the numbers nicely previous the brink.
What we all know: The Medusa pendant is among the earliest jewels designed by Louis Consolation Tiffany, dated circa 1900. In line with Sotheby’s, the ornamental arts grasp first started delving into jewellery design in 1902 in preparation for the Louisiana Buy Exposition of 1904 (aka the St. Louis World’s Honest). A small pamphlet printed on the time of the exposition lists 27 gadgets, together with 9 brooches, 10 hair ornaments, three necklaces, two pendants, one girdle, one hat pin, and one tiara. In addition to the Medusa pendant, solely three out of the 27 works from the exposition are recognized to exist immediately.
Till the historic pendant landed at Sotheby’s through the Schocken household (of Germany, New York, and Israel), it had a “whereabouts unknown” standing. The jewel’s unique proprietor was Henry Walters (1848–1931), a outstanding collector and patron of Tiffany all through the Gilded Age who is assumed to have bought the Medusa pendant in Paris on the Salon de la Société des Artistes Français of 1906.
In 1943, it was offered by Parke-Bernet Galleries (from the property of Mrs. Henry Walters). It’s not recognized if Salman Schocken bought the piece immediately on the 1943 public sale or through an agent, nevertheless it has been in possession of the household since then.
And now it’s another person’s flip to personal a chunk of historical past.
“The Medusa pendant was instantly recognizable to me for just a few causes,” Carol Elkins, Sotheby’s senior jewellery specialist, tells JCK. “Over a number of a long time of researching and dealing with different jewels designed by Louis Consolation Tiffany, I’ve referred to the varied publications on Tiffany jewels the place the Medusa pendant is illustrated and mentioned. The design of the jewel is so hanging and unforgettable that it sticks within the reminiscence banks, and due to the point out of its unknown whereabouts, the hope was all the time that it will someday reappear.”
“Museum curators and jewellery historians are keenly conscious of the importance of the Medusa pendant, not solely as a result of it was one of many earliest jewels designed by Louis Consolation Tiffany, one he really signed, however there are additionally the historic information that it had been exhibited on the St. Louis World’s Honest in 1904 and once more in 1906 on the Société des Artistes Français in Paris, and that it had been bought immediately from Tiffany by Henry Walters, founding father of the Walters Artwork Gallery in Baltimore,” says Sotheby’s Carol Elkins.
“Not all jewels include such an in depth provenance,” says Elkins. “It is perhaps thought of a holy grail of Louis Consolation Tiffany jewels for these causes.”