Featured Jewellery - Estate and Antique Jewelry

Estate and Antique Jewelry

Estate and antique jewelry (also known as vintage jewelry) can be challenging
for a variety of reasons. For one thing, older jewelry was made with different
standards, so the rules you’ve learned for newer jewelry may not apply. Older
diamonds, for example, were cut differently and may not be as brilliant, but
that doesn’t necessarily make them less valuable. Another challenge is that,
because the jewelry has presumably changed hands at least a few times
through the generations, it’s often difficult to tell what’s original and what
has been altered over the years.
Note
This category is much too complex to cover in a few short paragraphs. If you are
genuinely interested in becoming a collector of valuable estate and antique jewelry,
I suggest you find a book providing a good overview of the field, or better, one that
goes into a lot of detail about the style you like.
Assessing Quality
Antique and estate jewelry play by somewhat different rules than modernday
pieces, simply because standards, rules, technology, and techniques were
so different several decades ago than they are today (see Figure 4.12).
Although buying vintage jewelry can be exciting and fun, you have to be
familiar with what you’re purchasing. Here are a few points to consider:
■ Condition. In the estate jewelry business, as with any antiques, dealers
use lingo to describe the condition of a piece. Terms include mint or
near-mint (like new), excellent (minimal wear, with no tarnishing
or chips), very good (slightly visible wear, a few chips), good (more
chipping and yellowing), and fair (missing stones and other visible
damage).
■ Pedigree. Which would you rather have: a ruby brooch that’s old, or
an old ruby brooch that belonged to Queen Victoria’s second cousin?
If you’re like the rest of us commoners, you probably will swoon for
the piece with the romantic past. On the regular eBay site, pieces
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Figure 4.12
Jewelry from popular design
periods such as Art Nouveau
can capture increased interest
in buyers. If it’s in exceptional
shape and has a bit of allure
attached to it, it can be even
more sought after.
pre-owned by celebrities or royalty might be few and far between; the
Sotheby’s eBay site, on the other hand, is more likely to get consignments
from the world’s elite.
Red Flags
Here are a few pitfalls to avoid when it comes to antique and estate jewelry:
■ Reproductions. Some manufacturers do big business finding beautiful
old pieces from in-demand jewelry periods—Art Deco, for example
—and making close reproductions of them, so they look exactly like
an older piece. There’s nothing wrong with this in theory, unless a
seller tries to pass it off as an estate piece. Be sure the seller sends you
a picture of the hallmark and stamp before bidding. You will probably
be able to tell from that information whether the piece is new or old.
A resource such as The Official Identification and Price Guide to
Antique Jewelry by Arthur Guy Kaplan (House of Collectibles, 1990)
can help you check these hallmarks to determine age and authenticity.
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■ Inaccurate statements about period and pedigree. Inexperienced sellers
often make this mistake. If a piece looks like a Victorian necklace,
the seller unequivocally calls it a Victorian necklace, even if the necklace
was actually manufactured in Trenton, New Jersey, in the 1970s,
not in England in the 1870s. Honest mistake, maybe, but it’s a seller’s
responsibility to be accurate, even if it means being vague and not
stating information definitively if he’s not positive about it. Write to
the seller to verify that he has proof that the piece has the background
he says it does.