Diamond & Platinum Brooch & Ring
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GUEST (rasping): This is jewelry that I inherited from my mother. Sorry, I have a little laryngitis.
APPRAISER:
Quite all right.
GUEST:
And I believe she got them from her mother and her grandmother. She left Germany before the war, emigrated to Palestine and then the United States.
APPRAISER:
I'll start with the diamond twin stone ring. It's platinum and what we would call transitional-cut diamonds. They're not quite old-European cuts, but they're not quite modern round brilliants, either. And each one of these center stones is about two-and-a-quarter carats.
GUEST:
Oh.
APPRAISER:
Not to mention that you have over a carat of baguette-cut diamonds in the shoulders. And I would say it dates to the 1950s. The brooch, however, is a bit of a different piece. It's Art Moderne, dating from about 1935. It's old-European and old-single-cut diamonds set in platinum, and the pin stem is white gold. The larger stones total about six carats.
GUEST:
Wow.
APPRAISER:
And then you have at least five more carats of additional diamond weight in the rest of the stones. So you're looking at around 11 carats of diamonds. We have additional fittings where you could turn this into two more brooches, or each one of these pieces comes apart and you can wear them as a suite of clips. And I think it's absolutely wonderful. Neither piece has any hallmarks that would tell us where they were from. So we're going to have to base our assessment on origin from the style. So the brooch, I would think it would be German or Austrian.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
And the ring, most likely American manufacture. The diamond ring, I would say for auction, you'd be looking at the $25,000 to $35,000 range.
GUEST:
Whoa. (laughs)
APPRAISER:
The brooch, it's very unusual. And I wouldn't be surprised if we could expect in the $40,000 to $60,000 range at auction.
GUEST:
Holy cow-- wow. That's amazing.
APPRAISER:
It's a great piece.
GUEST:
Yeah, I think that's amazing. I'm kind of speechless. Voiceless and speechless.
(both laugh)
GUEST:
That's amazing, thank you.
APPRAISER:
Excellent, well, thank you very much.
Appraisal Details
Executive producer Marsha Bemko shares her tips for getting the most out of ANTIQUES ROADSHOW.
Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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Context is key: Listen carefully. Most of our experts will give appraisal values in context. For example, you'll often hear them say what an item is worth "at auction," or "retail," or "for insurance purposes" (replacement value). Retail prices are different from wholesale prices. Often an auctioneer will talk about what she knows best: the auction market. A shop owner will usually talk about what he knows best: the retail price he'd place on the object in his shop. And though there are no hard and fast rules, an object's auction price can often be half its retail value; yet for other objects, an auction price could be higher than retail. As a rule, however, retail and insurance/replacement values are about the same.
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