Diamond Sautoir Necklace & Earrings, ca. 1905
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GUEST:
The necklace was given to my grandmother, and this was a picture of her wearing the piece.
APPRAISER:
What this is, is what we call a sautoir necklace, and sautoir comes from a French term that means jump rope, 'cause they were very, very long necklaces. Now, you can see in the picture, versus now, I think at some point, maybe one of these pearl sections came undone and they just made the necklace a little shorter, which is where these two pieces came from. I think they were once pieces of the necklace, and when it was shortened, someone just decided to make earrings. The sautoir became very popular when Queen Alexandra started wearing them in the Edwardian period. The metal is platinum and then it's set with diamonds, and they're mostly old European-cuts with a mix of single-cuts in there, too. At the center there is an old European-cut diamond that's about two carats. And you can see that the design is this kind of beautiful lacy characteristic, which means it's an earlier sautoir, probably made about in 1905, 1910. The necklace and earrings together, if they came up at auction, we would value them somewhere between $20,000 to $30,000.
GUEST:
That's nice.
APPRAISER:
(laughs)
Appraisal Details
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