Doris Duke's Jewelry Up for Auction
Doris Duke is always near the top of the list of the most legendary jewelry collectors in history. The only child of James Buchanan Duke, who started the American Tobacco Company, Doris was dubbed "the richest girl in the world" at the age of 12 when she inherited her father's fortune after his death. Though Doris was an avid art collector and philanthropist who left most of her money to charity, she is still most widely known for her unparalleled collection of jewelry, which reflected her numerous passions.
Her collection included everything from rare Belle Époque Cartier pieces she inherited from her mother and grandmother, to jewels she bought on her travels to India and Southeast Asia, and pieces by Tiffany & Co. and David Webb that she purchased during the last decades of her life. She personally picked out each jewel that she added to her collection, and had a hand in designing many of them.
However, Duke did not consider herself a formal collector of jewelry. Instead, she regarded her collection as entirely accidental. " The fact that Doris Duke considered her jewelry to be an accidental collection is quite extraordinary,"Jacqueline Hausler of Christie's noted to T&C. "The magnificence, beauty and quality of objects is remarkable and quite uniquely tells a story of privilege, taste, and a shifting lifestyle over the course of many decades spanning two centuries."
After Duke died in 1993, she left her vast estate to her family's charitable foundations and her collection of jewelry was auctioned by Christies in June 2004 to benefit the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The unprecedented sale achieved close to $12 million, which was double the auction's estimate.
Over the next few weeks Christie's will resell three lots of Duke's jewels. Two of the lots are important Art Deco pieces designed by Cartier, and they will be sold on April 26th during the auction houses's Magnificent Jewels sale in New York City. One is a pair of diamond bracelets, which can also be turned into a choker and is estimated to sell for between $700,000 and $1 million. The other is a sapphire and pearl bracelet estimated to sell for between $600,000 and $800,000.
And on May 17th, the auction house will sell a necklace that belonged to the heiress during its Magnificent Magnificent Jewels sale in Geneva. The necklace was sold as a mounting during the 2004 auction; Duke had removed all of the diamonds from the piece before her death. After the auction, the buyer painstakingly replaced every single diamond in the mounting, which was made in 1937. The finished necklace is estimated to sell for between $3,000,000 and $5,000,000, which shows the power of a Doris Duke provenance.
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