Antiques Roadshow

APPRAISER

You have a note here, your sister-in-law found this in... when? 1972, 1973?

GUEST

1972. It was in a box of, she thought, costume jewelry.

APPRAISER

So she said, "This was in the box and I saw something that was special, so I took it." Well, indeed, she did find something that's very special. It's a very interesting piece of Art Nouveau jewelry. Art Nouveau was the fashion of the Belle Epoque of the era just before World War I and there were a number of very famous jewelry designers from that period, and what they did was to take very, very naturalistic forms. If you look at the... the brooch you'll see it's a peacock feather. Now, that's been done in enamel, which is translucent so you can see the gold of the jewelry underneath it and below the peacock feathers it's a woman's head, tendrils of hair. Precious metals have since really the Middle Ages been marked, but when we looked at the back of this we discovered a full set of French hallmarks. If we turn it over, you can see on the clasp as well as on the pin a number of very, very tiny marks. The problem is we couldn't figure out who it was exactly.

GUEST

Oh, okay.

APPRAISER

There is a partial maker's mark of just the man's last name, "F." There are a number of very famous French jewelers such as Fouquet, Feuilltre who were making Art Nouveau jewelry at this time. So when we look at something like this and can't find out exactly who did make it you look at the quality of it and even if we didn't know who made the jewelry it's such a nice piece, it's such high quality that probably it would sell at an auction, perhaps for around $2,500, maybe $3,500 if you tried to replace it in a shop today.

GUEST

It's beautiful. Thank you very much.