GUEST (rasping): This is jewelry that I inherited from my mother. Sorry, I have a little laryngitis.
APPRAISER: Quite all right.
GUEST: And I believe she got them from her mother and her grandmother. She left Germany before the war, emigrated to Palestine and then the United States.
APPRAISER: I'll start with the diamond twin stone ring. It's platinum and what we would call transitional-cut diamonds. They're not quite old-European cuts, but they're not quite modern round brilliants, either. And each one of these center stones is about two-and-a-quarter carats.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: Not to mention that you have over a carat of baguette-cut diamonds in the shoulders. And I would say it dates to the 1950s. The brooch, however, is a bit of a different piece. It's Art Moderne, dating from about 1935. It's old-European and old-single-cut diamonds set in platinum, and the pin stem is white gold. The larger stones total about six carats.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: And then you have at least five more carats of additional diamond weight in the rest of the stones. So you're looking at around 11 carats of diamonds. We have additional fittings where you could turn this into two more brooches, or each one of these pieces comes apart and you can wear them as a suite of clips. And I think it's absolutely wonderful. Neither piece has any hallmarks that would tell us where they were from. So we're going to have to base our assessment on origin from the style. So the brooch, I would think it would be German or Austrian.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And the ring, most likely American manufacture. The diamond ring, I would say for auction, you'd be looking at the $25,000 to $35,000 range.
GUEST: Whoa. (laughs)
APPRAISER: The brooch, it's very unusual. And I wouldn't be surprised if we could expect in the $40,000 to $60,000 range at auction.
GUEST: Holy cow-- wow. That's amazing.
APPRAISER: It's a great piece.
GUEST: Yeah, I think that's amazing. I'm kind of speechless. Voiceless and speechless.
(both laugh)
GUEST: That's amazing, thank you.
APPRAISER: Excellent, well, thank you very much.
