Christie’s November Jewels: A Specialist’s Selection Across Eras

A brooch delicate as lace, its folds catching light through precious materials grown scarce. A parure vivid with the colours of the East, reimagined through Parisian hands. A serpentine necklace invoking ancient myth. The jewels Althéa Hanshaw Haft has chosen for Christie's November sales tell the story not of a single collector's taste, but of how history, geography and material circumstance shaped the jewellery that endures.

For Hanshaw Haft, Christie's jewellery specialist, each piece speaks to its moment. The Van Cleef & Arpels 'Dentelle' brooch from the 1940s, with its intricate lace-like folds, carries within it the resourcefulness of an era when gold and platinum were themselves rationed. Later, as travel became possible again, the Maison's parure from the 1960s erupts with colour and elaborate detail, its designs drawn directly from the journeys the Arpels brothers made through India, fusing Eastern splendour with the restrained elegance that defined Parisian luxury.

Design as Cultural Record

The selection Hanshaw Haft has curated moves beyond the familiar rhetoric of jewellery as mere adornment. Each piece functions as a document: of scarcity and ingenuity, of wanderlust crystallised into form, of the moment when a house's signature style crystallised into its own visual language. The Van Cleef & Arpels brooch is not delicate despite wartime constraint; it is delicate because of it. The economies imposed by shortage became an aesthetic principle, one that has endured for nearly a century.

By contrast, the 1960s parure represents the opposite impulse: abundance, colour, the luxury of complexity. The Arpels brothers' travels were not incidental to these designs. They were embedded in them. Indian jewellery's intricate surface ornament, its layering of detail and richness of gemstone colour, met the Maison's own disciplined geometry and technical virtuosity. The result was neither Indian nor purely French, but something that could only emerge from the collision of two traditions in the hands of makers alert to both.

Bulgari's Serpent Through Time

Also within the sales is Bulgari's 'Serpenti' necklace, a design rooted in classical antiquity but realised through twentieth-century craftsmanship. The serpent has haunted jewellery since antiquity itself, carrying meanings both protective and transgressive. Bulgari's interpretation of the form, sinuous and unmistakable, represents a different kind of historical consciousness: not the makers' immediate moment, but a distant past made present through contemporary technique and an assured visual vocabulary.

Each sale within the November offerings reflects the same careful attention. Whether emerald and diamond, or the studied colour combinations that define mid-century design, the pieces Hanshaw Haft has selected speak to collectors who understand that jewellery is never merely precious material. It is evidence of what was possible to imagine, and to make, at a particular moment.

Christie's Jewels Online runs from 5 to 18 November, with entries spanning design across decades. The live sale, Magnificent Jewels Including the Bulgari Pink, takes place on 10 November. Both afford collectors the chance to acquire not merely gems and gold, but the crystallised intelligence of houses and makers who understood their own moment acutely enough to transcend it.

Key Facts

• Online Auction: Jewels Online, 5–18 November
• Live Sale: Magnificent Jewels Including the Bulgari Pink, 10 November
• Featured Designer (1): Van Cleef & Arpels 'Dentelle' brooch, 1940s
• Featured Designer (2): Van Cleef & Arpels Maison parure, 1960s
• Featured Designer (3): Bulgari 'Serpenti' necklace
• Specialist: Althéa Hanshaw Haft, Christie's Jewellery Department

The Simply Luxury View

For the discerning collector, Hanshaw Haft's curation offers a masterclass in how to read jewellery historically and aesthetically at once. The Van Cleef & Arpels pieces especially demonstrate how constraint breeds refinement; the 1960s parure shows what happens when a house absorbs external influence without surrendering its own voice. This is not nostalgia, but evidence that the most enduring jewellery emerges not from excess, but from clarity about materials, geography and one's own tradition.

The inclusion of Bulgari alongside the French houses underscores a broader truth: the twentieth century's great jewellery houses, though distinct in their visual languages, shared a commitment to the idea that precious materials and skilled making could together create objects of genuine cultural significance. These November sales provide a concentrated opportunity to acquire examples from three moments in that history, each told through a single house's uncompromising vision.

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