Editor’s Note
The recent auction of Vanderbilt family jewels, fetching four times their estimated value, highlights the enduring fascination with America’s Gilded Age—a fascination currently amplified by popular culture. This sale underscores how historical artifacts can captivate modern audiences, blending tangible history with contemporary storytelling.
Fans of ‘The Gilded Age’, prepare to be enthralled. Rare jewels that once belonged to the aristocratic Vanderbilt family, the real-life American dynasty at the centre of the popular costume drama series, have just been sold by auction house Phillips – for four times their pre-sale estimates.
While Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose famously unhappy marriage to the British Duke of Marlborough was the inspiration for Gladys Russell’s marriage to Duke of Buckingham in ‘The Gilded Age’, certainly looms large in our imaginations right now, she wasn’t the only glamorous Vanderbilt heiress to have amassed an amazing jewellery collection during her lifetime.
In 1908, her elegant cousin, Gladys Moore Vanderbilt, wed the Hungarian Count László Széchényi in a high-profile event at the Vanderbilt mansion in New York. The crowd of onlookers, reporters and photographers who gathered to steal a glance at the bride and her dashing groom grew so large, the police had to be called out, and a decoy horse-drawn carriage was deployed to divert the crowd’s attention as the newlywed couple were spirited away from the celebration in a limousine.
As befits a socialite from one of America’s most renowned and influential families, Gladys Vanderbilt Széchényi’s wedding gifts from relatives included a treasure trove of extravagant diamond, gemstone and pearl jewellery, including diamond chains, ropes of pearls, rings and pendants. Her mother, Alice Vanderbilt, presented her with an opulent Cartier tiara set with interchangeable pear-cut amethysts and diamonds and sprays of diamond lily motifs which could also be detached and worn as brooches.
The headpiece was later dismantled but one of its floral brooches – alongside 11 other luxurious Vanderbilt jewels – has just sold for CHF 451,500 ($564,664), over five times its low pre-sale estimate of CHF 80,000 ($100,000).
The spectacular sale was led by ‘The Vanderbilt Sapphire’, a sugarloaf Kashmir sapphire and diamond brooch weighing over 42 carats, mounted by Tiffany & Co, which had a pre-sale estimate of CHF 800,000 – 1,200,000 ($1 million – 1.5 million).
Also a wedding gift from Alice Vanderbilt, the piece boasts a delicate openwork design embellished with old-cut diamonds and represents the pinnacle of Belle Époque refinement, embodying the era’s supreme artistic and social ambitions. It ended up selling for CHF 2,876,000 ($3,570,841).
Exceedingly rare and exquisitely made, the jewels from the Vanderbilt collection represent the glittering elegance and style of a bygone era, and of the grand families that once patronised the world’s greatest craftspeople – both which still clearly fascinate us over a century later.