Spectacularly expensive, strikingly beautiful, extraordinarily rare and historic jewels appear with stunning regularity at auctions around the world and online. While the sheer number of pieces may lead onlookers to believe sourcing them is easy, jewelry specialists can often spend a decade or more finessing their way to a coup this important.
“I worked on the royal Bourbon-Parma collection for many, many years,” says Brett O’Connor, senior international jewelry director for Bonhams. “I went
to visit the owner 12 years before she passed, and it was a long process. It was more about her getting to know me and trust me.”
Quig Bruning, vice president and senior specialist in Sotheby’s jewelry department, also has experience with chasing elusive consignments. He’s currently pursuing a collection that has been in the works for six years.
“Sometimes it can be years, I mean years and years and years,” he says. “Sometimes it can even be a decade or more. Then there are times where you might have one meeting with the person, and they say, ‘I like you, I trust you, let’s do this.’ You never know if it’s something you’re going to pursue for years or 10 minutes, you shake hands and you’re done.”
Reaching their comfort level
The reason procuring certain goods can take so long is that the auction business is built primarily on relationships. A lot of it is about a client’s comfort level.
“Jewelry is really intimate, deeply personal and emotional,” Bruning explains. “It always has a story, and it is typically given at really great moments in one’s life. Moving on from that, selling that, is an emotional proposition. They sell million-dollar paintings all the time, but they don’t want to sell a $10,000 diamond ring that’s been sitting in the vault for years because it’s their mother’s engagement ring.”
Bruning says he would much rather a client sell years too late than a day too early, because once a piece is sold, it’s gone. “We want clients to feel comfortable with the decision they’ve made and [with knowing] that the piece that spoke to a specific moment in their life, or their family’s life, is going to be owned by somebody else.”
Debt, death and divorce
The very fact that jewelry owners form such emotional attachments to their pieces, of course, begs the question of why they would choose to sell in the first place.
“There are three main reasons why people sell jewelry,” O’Connor says. “This is not exclusive, but a general rule of thumb. It’s the three Ds: debt, death
and divorce.”
Bruning agrees, noting that while jewelry is absolutely emotional, it can also be contentious.
“I think with inherited jewels, there are usually two big motivations,” he elaborates. “One of them is lifestyle — if the child doesn’t have the same lifestyle as the parent, and the jewels aren’t going to be worn. I think that is one big part of it. But the other thing — and I tell this to clients all the time — it’s a lot easier to split a dollar than it is to split a diamond. I mean, we’re talking about inheritance, and if you have multiple heirs who all want a piece of jewelry, everyone can’t be wearing the same ring at the same time. So oftentimes, selling it is just the cleanest way of maintaining the family relationships.”
A multi-pronged approach
While O’Connor has sealed deals over oyster-and-champagne brunches at clients’ homes, there are a number of other avenues by which auction houses acquire the pieces for their sales.
Many see walk-in customers, or get emails and phone calls from potential clients thanks to advertising and name recognition. Sotheby’s and Christie’s also offer online auction estimate requests, where customers can upload an image and a short description of their jewelry.
“We’ve actually sourced some very significant consignments through that platform,” says Daphne Lingon, head of jewelry for Christie’s Americas.
All the auction houses have relationships with trust and estate lawyers, bankers, and other representatives, who get in touch when they have available lots. Other jewels come through recommendations from clients who have previously sold pieces with the company.
“Sometimes it’s very organic,” relates Susan Abeles, head of jewelry for the Americas at Phillips. “Sometimes someone is at a cocktail party, meets someone else, they have a conversation, and it plants a seed.”
Often, the auction house gets a lead from another department — for instance, when a customer originally calling to sell artwork also has jewelry they are thinking of consigning. Or it could be as simple as following the trail of an interesting piece that you know belongs to a certain person, Abeles says. In addition, Christie’s regularly checks in with clients for whom the house has done insurance or tax appraisals.
“Because these are relationships we cultivate for many, many years, we know sometimes there’s a market for a certain piece someone has, and we can tell them we’ve seen an uptick in the market and ask whether they would consider selling,” says Lingon. “We will approach them if we feel it’s beneficial to them to potentially consign something. We keep those dialogues and those relationships going.”
The auction houses don’t worry much about the expense of an item if they know there’s enough demand.
“It’s less about the price range and more about the auctionability of something,” maintains Bruning. “That’s definitely more art than science. The main question is, is there competition? It’s really a multi-pronged approach, and in terms of how we get the property, we’re pretty agnostic.... We’re happy to work with the client by whatever means necessary.”
‘A modern-day treasure hunt’
After speaking with a potential seller and perusing pictures and certificates, jewelry specialists meet with the client to get a firsthand look at the goods.
“It’s a little bit like being in a modern-day treasure hunt, because you just never know what you’re going to see,” says O’Connor. “You go to bank vaults, you go to people’s homes, you go to their offices, and you’re waiting to see what’s going to be revealed.”
But some of the best jewels have come from the most unexpected places. O’Connor remembers a piece that came to him when he served as a jewelry specialist for the television series
Antiques Roadshow.
“A lady in her mid- to late 80s stood outside all night long in the cold, in a line of 10,000 people,” he recalls. “She finally made her way to me after waiting 12 hours, and said, ‘Dear, I don’t know if I’ve wasted your time and my time, but I’ve just got this little bauble I’ve been keeping in my lingerie drawer.’ She then bent down, hiked up her skirt, and pulled down her pantyhose, and I just, I had no idea what to do. I was trying to look to the left and right, anywhere but at this sweet little old lady. It turns out she had a little bag pinned inside her pantyhose, and she pulled the bag out. From inside, she brought out what at the time was the most impressive 5-carat, untreated Burmese ruby I had ever seen in my career. She had thought it was a piece of costume jewelry, but I ended up selling that gem for a record price at the time of about $800,000.”
While O’Connor’s account may seem out of the ordinary, Bruning says every auction house jewelry specialist has a piece with a crazy story attached.
“We sold an estate that was principally impressionist paintings, and as part of the deal, we were doing an appraisal for all the jewelry, which we had been led to believe was just a bunch of gold chains, nothing particularly important or impressive,” he recalls. “When my colleague and I got there, the assistant tells us there were actually a lot more pieces than what was originally thought. Needless to say, we were not terribly excited. Then she pulls out the first piece, which was this amazing brooch in the form of a dog by René Boivin. She kept pulling out one great jewel after the next...and no one knew they had existed. Then she decided to check the costume jewelry drawer, and lo and behold, out comes a 6-carat diamond engagement ring that we ended up selling for a couple hundred thousand dollars.”
After acquisition
Sourcing the jewel is only the first step in a long journey to auction. Once it’s acquired, it can often take anywhere from 10 weeks to three months until a piece is ready for sale. Specialists evaluate the item, apply an estimated price to it, and check that it’s in good condition.
“All the specialists will look at the piece just to make sure the estimate is correct, then we check if it needs cleaning or polishing,” Lingon says. “Does it need to be looked at by a jeweler? Are there any repairs that need to be made, just so we are presenting it in its optimal form?”
The auction house will catalog the pieces and send them to labs for certificates and confirmation of any treatments, before writing a description, taking a photo, and putting them into a catalog that it sends out to clients. From there, the jewelry specialists assign each piece to a specific sale, based on multiple factors: what type of piece it is, where the market is strongest, and where it is likely to garner the most money, among other considerations.
“We choose the auction venue based on what will yield the highest value for the client,” says O’Connor. “We’re in the same boat, we’re interested in the same things, because what benefits the client also benefits the auction house.”
To generate excitement for the pieces, the specialists then call clients around the world who they know have an interest in the items going on sale. Finally, the items are taken on the road and exhibited in different venues so potential buyers can get a firsthand view of the jewels before they go up for auction.
The coronavirus effect
Like most other businesses, auction houses have taken a strong hit from the Covid-19 crisis. Although live sales can be postponed or moved online, sourcing jewels has been a logistical nightmare.
“We had a live sale scheduled for June, and we were still collecting for that sale, so we had to take a step back [from doing that] when we went into lockdown,” Abeles reveals.
While Bonhams is following up all inquiries by phone and video and doing everything it can to source goods short of actually viewing them, Sotheby’s has been able to take its acquisition process a step further.
“We’ve become much more adept at working with clients, at looking at pieces [via] images or videos, and then we spend hours and hours on the phone,” Bruning says. “We are also sourcing pieces anew, working with consigners who, by and large, we know and trust, and we are able to look at things from a social distance just to confirm everything. It’s not been the easiest thing in the world to do, but we are trying to be more flexible.”
Christie’s has had an easier time as far as having enough goods to hold online sales during Covid-19. Since the auction house sources jewels for digital sales several months in advance, it already had property in place and ready to go when the virus broke out, Lingon reports.
The pandemic has also raised the glass ceiling regarding which goods are included in online sales. Some auction houses are offering high-value items digitally that would normally be reserved for live events.
“I think this has been a very good test case,” says O’Connor. “Clients have been very willing to buy online. I think you’ll see more of a shift in the industry to selling online.”
Lingon agrees. Consignors have found the results of Christie’s online sales so encouraging that more are getting in touch and asking to sell their items digitally, she reports. “This has just accelerated the process for offering higher-value lots online, and we will certainly continue to do that as we go forward.”
Images: Sotheby’s; Phillips; Bonhams, Christie’sArticle from the Rapaport Magazine - July 2020. To subscribe click here.