Sotheby's to Sell Tsar Ferdinand's Royal Jewels
October 07, 24
(IDEX Online) - Over 100 items of jewelry owned by the late Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria - unseen in public for over a century - are to be auctioned by Sotheby's Geneva.
They represent "one of the most important collections of royal and noble jewels from the courts of central Europe ever to come to auction" and will be presented as part of the Royal and Noble Jewels Sale taking place on 13 November.
Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, born in 1861, served as Tsar from 1908 until he abdicated in 1918 in favor of his son Boris III. He was exiled to Germany, where he died in 1948.
His jewelry collection spans almost a century of his family's history and includes items that belonged to his mother, Princess Clementine of Orleans, daughter of the last French King Louis Philippe 1 and herself an avid jewelry collector.
A number of the lots - 114 with a total estimate of $1.2m to $1.8m - feature high quality colored diamonds and gemstones and were produced locally by Austro-Hungarian jewelers or by the leading international jewelers of the day, such as Bapst, Eugène Fontenay, Froment-Meurice and Castellani.
Leading the sale, on 6 and 7 November, is a yellow gold tie pin (pictured) with a fleur-de-lis motif set with a 2.08 carat pear-shaped fancy gray-blue diamond and four colored diamonds.
It includes a 0.65 carat fancy pink diamond, a 0.52 fancy green diamond, a 0.47 carat fancy deep brown-orange diamond and a 0.13 carat fancy intense green-yellow diamond. Estimate $500,000 to $700,000.