By Jenny Gross
London: Flora Steel, an art historian, bought a silver brooch more than three decades ago at an antique fair in the English Midlands for about £20 ($38 today). After wearing it on the lapel of one of her favourite coats for several years, she put it away in a cupboard, where it went untouched for two decades.
That was until last year, when Steel was scrolling through YouTube on her phone and came across a 2011 BBC story about a brooch being presented on the television show Antiques Roadshow. In the clip, presenter Geoffrey Munn showed a page with sketches of other brooches designed by the same Victorian-era architect and artist.
Flora Steel with the antique brooch she owned for more than 30 years before she realised its value.Credit: Gildings Auctioneers/The New York Times
“I thought, ‘Heavens, that’s mine!’ ” Steel said.
Munn said on the show that he dreamt of finding brooches designed by the artist, William Burges, calling his jewellery the “almost-holy grail of Victorian 19th century design”.
On Tuesday, Steel’s brooch sold for £9500 ($18,000) to a private collector at Gildings Auctioneers in Market Harborough, England. It is made of silver, lapislazuli, malachite and pink coral.
“It caught my eye for its incredible design – its beautiful use of stones,” said Steel, who has collected silver jewellery since she was 13 years old.
The brooch by the Victorian-era designer and architect William Burges, is made of silver, lapis lazuli, malachite and coral.Credit: Gildings Auctioneers/The New York Times
Steel was the third person to sell a William Burges brooch by auction through Gildings; the other two also realised their brooches’ value after watching Antiques Roadshow. One of the brooches sold for £31,000 in 2011.
Burges, who is best known for designing Cardiff Castle in Wales, made the brooches for the weddings of two friends in 1864, Gildings said, citing annotations on the original sketches of the brooches, which are stored at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Steel’s brooch, which has a Victorian Gothic aesthetic, is inscribed with the initials “JCG” of the Reverend John Gibson, a cleric-scholar, and Caroline Bendyshe, a great-niece of Admiral Lord Nelson.
“If those pages of sketches hadn’t survived, the association with the designer would have been completely lost to the annals of history,” said Will Gilding, a director at Gildings.
Steel, who is from Britain but lives in Rome, said her delight in discovering that she owned a long-lost, treasured brooch brought her much-needed joy after two years of treatment for breast cancer.
After successful treatment, she said she was planning to donate some of the money to a breast cancer research fund and give some to her son. She was also contemplating setting some aside for herself for a five-day horseback riding trip through Tuscany, Italy, and for a visit to the San Carlo opera house in Naples.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.