You Can Buy These Gilded Age Jewels That Once Belonged to the Vanderbilt Family
The collection, which will hit the auction block in November, includes a fragment of the tiara that Gladys Vanderbilt received upon her marriage to a Hungarian count
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The Vanderbilt family has long captured the American imagination, from their opulent parties in the 1800s to 20th-century spreads in Vogue to HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” which was recently renewed for a fourth season. Now, interested bidders can capture glitzy mementos of the dynasty’s wealth.
The auction house Phillips will sell a trove of Vanderbilt family jewels at Geneva’s Hotel President on November 10. The sale comes at a time of high market enthusiasm for period jewels, particularly from the Belle Époque, according to the auction house. Between 2022 and 2024, the auction house’s jewels sales doubled, reports Artnet’s Richard Whiddington.
Quick fact: What is the Belle Époque?
The term, French for “beautiful era,” refers to the period between the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) and the beginning of World War I (1914).
“The Vanderbilt family jewels stand as the purest embodiment of Gilded Age elegance—pieces of extraordinary beauty, historical resonance and fascinating provenance,” Benoît Repellin, Phillips’ head of jewelry, says in a statement. The jewels are expected to “capture the imagination of collectors worldwide.”
Many of the items on the auction block belonged to Gladys Vanderbilt, who became Countess Széchényi upon her 1908 marriage to Count László Széchényi of Hungary. The daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, chairman of the New York Central Railroad, Gladys grew up extraordinarily wealthy. She and her siblings were raised in the largest private mansion ever built in New York City, which sat on Fifth Avenue where the Bergdorf Goodman Building is today, and spent their summers at the Breakers, a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, Rhode Island.
The crown jewel of the Phillips collection is the “Vanderbilt Sapphire,” a Tiffany & Company brooch with a sugarloaf Kashmir sapphire at its center, surrounded by a decadent design made of old-cut diamonds. Gladys received it as a gift from her mother, Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, who was the matriarch of the Vanderbilt family for more than 60 years. The piece weighs almost 43 carats, and it’s expected to fetch between $1 million and $1.5 million.
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“More than a family heirloom, this jewel embodied the era’s artistic and social ambitions, pioneered by one of the greatest American dynasties,” the official description for the brooch reads.
Also hitting the auction block is a Cartier diamond brooch, which was originally part of a Belle Époque tiara commissioned by Alice for Gladys upon her high-profile marriage. The decadent tiara, which celebrated Gladys’ new role as a countess belonging to European aristocracy, was eventually dismantled into parts. The resulting brooch, featuring a 4.55-carat pear-shaped diamond, is estimated to sell for between $100,000 and $150,000.
The marriage between Gladys, an American, and the Hungarian count was “the talk of New York City,” per Artnet. The couple married on a cloudless day with a ceremony of the “simplest character” before 400 friends and relatives, while a “small army of reporters and photographers” waited outside, as the New York Times reported in 1908. Even Pope Pius X sent a cable message to the wedding containing an apostolic benediction.
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Other Vanderbilt items going under the hammer include an emerald and diamond bow-shaped brooch (estimated at $5,000 to $8,000), a diamond comb ($3,000 to $5,000), a Cartier vanity case featuring Gladys’ monogram ($8,000 to $12,000), a traveling Cartier clock ($5,000 to $8,000), and a gold wristwatch by Cartier ($3,000 to $5,000).
Prior to the auction, the items will be displayed in Hong Kong, New York, Singapore, Taipei, London and Geneva.
Shiny as they may be, the Vanderbilt jewels “weren’t merely adornments,” Repellin tells Town & Country’s Leena Kim. “They were badges of rank, symbols of status and tools to cement one’s place among aristocracy.”
Taken together, the Vanderbilt treasures represent “what a fine Belle Époque jewelry assemblage looked like in its time,” Repellin adds. “The Cartier brooch, for instance, with its naturalistic motifs and exquisite setting, is quintessential Belle Époque. The era is inseparably bound to the Vanderbilt name.”