It was one of the most anticipated auctions of the autumn season. The so-called Royal & Noble Jewels of the house of Sotheby’s, which celebrated its third edition this Wednesday 12 November, is already an event dedicated to luxury collecting, which meets every year in the city of Geneva to purchase jewels of great historical interest, belonging for centuries to noble and royal houses from all over Europe and, in many cases, dormant in private collections that have decided to sell them. This 2025, after the 2024 acquisition of a rare and historic 300-carat diamond necklace from the 18th century for $4.8 million, Sotheby’s has prepared another irresistible candy: a brooch that belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte. The jewel was sold at auction for 3.8 million euros.
The piece, valued at between 130,000 and 216,000 euros, had been worn on the French emperor’s bicorne on special occasions, but ended up missing during his escape at the Battle of Waterloo, already besieged by the British and Prussian armies and with his carriages, full of his treasures, muddied near the war camp. The circular brooch, 45 millimeters in diameter, with a large oval diamond of 13.04 carats in the center and surrounded by almost a hundred diamonds of different shapes and sizes arranged in two concentric rows, ended up being a war trophy for the Prussian king Frederick William III. In any case, Napoleon would no longer need him on the island of St. Helena, where the English sent him.
In an intense auction that lasted just under 10 minutes, four telephone bidders, one other online and another present in the auction room of the Swiss city competed for the so-called hat button, which ultimately reached 30 times the minimum estimate, with a final price of 4,380,534 dollars, or almost 3.8 million euros. Its new owner is a distinguished international collector, whom Sotheby’s has not named.
The other Napoleonic jewel presented at auction, a 132.66-carat green beryl with a starting price of between 34,000 and 51,000 euros that the emperor wore for his coronation in 1804, was purchased by an American museum that bid online for the astonishing sum of 1,041,044 dollars, more than 25 times its low estimate.
Another of the jewels at the Sotheby’s auction that aroused the most enthusiasm was the ring with pink diamonds that belonged to Empress Catherine I of Russia and then became part of the private collection of the last Ottoman princess, Fatma Neslisah (died at the age of 91 in 2012). In the tender it reached the minimum estimate 12 times, with a final price of 3,622,914 dollars, 3,118,785 euros.
This latest auction of Royal & Noble Jewels, the only one of its kind in the world, is the third consecutive for Sotheby’s of what, in the world of auctions, are known as the “white gloves”, those in which everything is sold and in which, at the end of the session, the auctioneer is usually given white gloves as a symbol of success. In this edition, the house generated a total of 14,328,947 dollars, 12,335,074 euros, the highest value achieved by a Royal and Noble sale since it became a permanent fixture in Sotheby’s annual sales calendar in 2023.
