Collecting Fine Jewelry

Looking Beyond the Jewelry Mass Market

The great 20th century jewelry makers such as Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, and Tiffany are among the top in the field for good reason. Their history, craftsmanship and status in the canon is secure. They are rightfully among the most sought after pieces in the collector market. And their prices reflect this demand, leaving less opportunity for collectors. The sophisticated buyer, at this point, begins to look elsewhere.

Elsewhere may mean a small group of makers whose quality is indistinguishable from, and in some respects superior to the houses that dominate the auction marquee. They have not, however, crossed the threshold into mass recognition, which means that knowledgeable collectors can pursue them with patience, knowledge, and the particular pleasure of knowing something the general public may not yet pursue.  

Verdura

Fulco di Verdura, Duke of Verdura, by birthright, came to jewelry through Coco Chanel, for whom he worked throughout the 1930s before opening his own New York salon in 1939. His signature was a kind of learned wildness: Byzantine in its references, Baroque in its materials. The Maltese Cross cuff he designed for Chanel and worn by Coco on both wrists simultaneously became one of the most imitated objects in the history of jewelry. 

The market has paid attention. In late 2023, a rare 1930s Maltese Cross cuff sold at Bonhams for $432,300, nearly double its high estimate. At a Doyle single-owner sale, a pair of Verdura sapphire and diamond earclips exceeded their $20,000–$30,000 estimate by more than double. The pattern is consistent when period and provenance coincide. 

David Webb

David Webb established his workshop in 1948 at the age of twenty-three, with a handful of jewelers and an aesthetic formed entirely by his visits to the Metropolitan Museum, where he studied ancient goldsmithing techniques with scholarly intensity. The result was jewelry that looked like nothing else being made in New York: hammered gold surfaces evoking archaic craftsmanship, enamel in colors borrowed from Byzantine mosaics, animal motifs executed with sculptural wit. And scale. His pieces were notably large and dramatic.

It is Webb’s work from the 1960s and early 1970s that the serious market pursues. A  cocktail ring set with a fancy light pinkish-brown diamond sold at Sotheby's in 2023 for nearly $700,000. At a Sotheby's online sale, eleven Webb lots totaled $112,000, with a gold and enamel cuff selling at $21,250 against a $6,000–$8,000 estimate. These results were consistently signaling that the work is undervalued relative to its quality and historical importance.

Seaman Schepps

What distinguished the work of Seaman Schepps (1881–1972), called "America's Court Jeweler", was a revolutionary approach to materials. He incorporated ebony, shells, amber, turquoise, and baroque pearls when such things were still considered mistakes and combined them with gold and precious stones in compositions that read today as thoroughly modern objects. These pieces belong to no period because they belong to a sensibility, which is what makes them endure.

More accessible pieces from the maker such as shell earclips, smaller brooches, and individual links remain findable in the $3,000–$15,000 range, a span that still offers genuine value for work of this quality. The house relocated its retail operation to Palm Beach after closing its Park Avenue store in 2020, which has done nothing to diminish collector interest. If anything, the reduced visibility has sharpened the appetite for collecting.

JAR

There’s a reason Joel Arthur Rosenthal, the genius behind the JAR acronym, was the only living “artist of gems” to have had a retrospective at the Museum of Metropolitan Art. After studying art history at Harvard and working for Bulgari in New York, he opened his own Paris shop on the Place Vendǒme in 1977, and has since created an unparalleled portfolio of masterworks. Forbes called him “the Faberge of our time.” 

Working exclusively with a select clientele on an appointment-only basis, his creations reference his background as a needleworker in their intricate detail and draw from the natural world of brilliantly hued flora and fauna. When 28 JAR pieces from a private collection went up for auction at Christie's Geneva, 100% of them found buyers, with many outperforming estimates. In June 2025, the Marie-Thérèse Pink diamond set by JAR sold at Christie's for $14 million, which was the auction record for any JAR jewel. 

Maison Boivin

Although Rene Boivin was sufficiently skilled to open his own atelier at the age of 26, it wasn’t until he married Jeanne Poiret, sister of the fabled couturier Paul, that his career truly began. Assisted immeasurably by the Poiret family connection, the Boivins traveled in the most fashionable Paris circles and developed a blue-chip clientele for whom they designed an extraordinary selection of jewels, drawing inspiration from Assyrian, Celtic, Egyptian and Etruscan traditions decades before they were popularized by the Art Deco movement. 

Following Rene’s early death in 1937, the family, Jeanne and daughter Germaine, burnished his legacy to a patina that shines brighter with each passing year. A Boivin starfish brooch, a house signature, sold for €235,000 at a Paris auction in 2018, more than double its high estimate.The 2024 Sotheby's "Iconic Jewels: Her Sense of Style" sale in Geneva featured the largest Boivin collection ever to come to auction, nearly 30 lots, with pieces estimated from CHF 4,000 up to CHF 80,000 for the most important demi-parures.

Belperron

When Jeanne Boivin hired Suzanne Belperron as a salesperson for the atelier in 1921, she could not have known that Suzanne would eventually become a designer of such skill and acclaim that in some eyes she would eclipse the stature of her mentors. Trained at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, she left Maison Boivin and established her own practice by 1931 and built a flawless reputation for creativity and uniqueness, famously refusing to sign her work, insisting that “my style is my signature.”  In 1963, the French government awarded her the rank of Knight of the Legion of Honor, prompting the Chicago Tribune to report that "What Chanel and Schiaparelli are in the French fashion world... Belperron is in the predominantly male fraternity of Paris jewelers.”

Belperron’s reluctance to use her signature made authentication of her pieces all but impossible for decades, frustrating prospective collectors. But the 2007 discovery of her design archive has cured this dilemma and the market for her work has exploded. At the most recent Christie's Magnificent Jewels auction in New York, 15 pieces from a single collection fetched nearly $3.6 million, with 13 of the lots exceeding their high estimates.

Andrew Grima

The title of the 2020 monograph “Andrew Grima: The Father of Modern Jewellery [sic]” is anything but hyperbolic. He is arguably the most influential jewelry designer of the post WWII era, with an astonishingly original oeuvre that matches the quality and cachet of his great predecessors.  He is the only jeweler to have been awarded the Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design and won the De Beers Diamonds International Award (often called the Oscars of jewelry design) a record 11 times. 

Grima’s collection of wristwatches for Omega became among the most coveted of the 20th century, channeling his brilliance at combining textured gold and audaciously colored gemstones to produce dazzling creations which transcended mere utility and entered the realm of fine art.

The Principle Behind the Names 

What unites these makers, and what separates them from the brands that dominate the mass market, is that their value derives from the work itself rather than from the name on the box. The signature adds provenance and authentication; It does not substitute for quality. This is the distinction that matters, and it is the one that the most sophisticated collectors have always understood. Their work outlasts the moment in which it was made with a value worth collecting.