Value & Worth

Having been in the Jewellery Trade for well over 40 years, value & worth have been on my mind for a long time.

Fashion & taste have had a massive impact on this trade for as long as it has existed as well as on clothes, decoration & interiors for the same period.

I have very strong views on this subject, most of which other people will disagree with however, I am still going to inflict these views on my readers & feel free to discuss or argue with or against as you see fit.

It's a huge subject so I am going to restrict my comments to just two pieces recently on the market which, in my opinion show the huge disparity between taste & value.

I have deliberately chosen two items which a jeweller & silversmith would not normally sell so that my (& I stress my) taste would not be influenced by my true love of diamonds, gems & silver.

My first choice is a wine glass. It was described in the catalogue as: A rare Jacobite wine glass, the drawn trumpet bowl engraved with an heraldic rose with single bud and a thistle emanating from the rose stem, together with an oak leaf and "FIAT", raised on a plain stem with tear and conical foot engraved with the Prince of Wales feathers, c.1745, height 14.4cms. PROVENANCE Tennants, Middleham. 

This is, in my opinion a remarkable piece & dates from the late 17th Century (for those who don't know when the Jacobites were around) & bearing in mind that it's glass & therefore fragile & in the hands quite often of people who were less than sober, I find it a minor miracle that it has survived.

It is spectacularly beautiful & elegant & for something over 300 years old shows a fantastic skill & talent in producing such a piece. I am not by any stretch of the imagination a glass expert or aficionado but I would love to own a piece of fragile art, and I don't use the word lightly, as this and feel it would be an honour to drink my wine from such an item.

What is more remarkable is the estimate (June 2016) of between £1000 & £2000 ($1500 to $3000) whilst this is not cheap it is also not particularly expensive for a survivor of such material, It is also useful.

My comparison piece is a print by Bob Carlos Clarke who I'm sure was a very talented artist but it is a print, in my opinion, that means a copy. Mr Clarke was a photographer and whilst I love photography, in my opinion it does not quite compare with painting, so what we have here is a print of a photograph, not quite such high art.

Slightly more worrying is the subject, The title of the piece is Vanessa & dates from 1989 & so is less than 30 years old, one tenth the age of the wine glass. The Artist model appears to be snarling at the audience & bluntly, would you want a snarling woman, however attractive, snarling down at you from the wall, sorry, but I don't.

As an aside, another copy of this print sold at Christie's in 2012 for £5625.00 but whilst the original was dated 1989, that copy was dated 2001 so they can in reality keep churning these things out, but limited editions means they probably shouldn't, but do you believe this?

This copy, dated 1989, also has an estimate of £3000 to £5000, June 2016, ($4500 to $7500) and if you were to buy this you would have, as I said earlier, a copy of a 30 year old photo of a lady, who is undoubtedly normally very pretty but appears to be snarling at you or possibly sneering at you for paying such a sum for her picture whereas for half (or less) the money you could have had a 300 year old wine glass.

OK, my comparison rant on value & worth is over for the moment, but I'm sure I will return to this subject at another time, Discuss?