GUEST: It's a family piece, and
I don't know, uh, much about it,
other than it came down through
a cousin to my grandmother, then
to my parents, and then to me.
APPRAISER: So this is a pansy
brooch. This dates to around the
turn of the 1900s.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: 1900 up to 1910.
Somewhere in that era. And this
one is great,
because it's got three pansies.
Commonly, you'll see brooches
with just a singular
pansy on it. And this one also
has a great enamel coloring to
it, and very impressive
that that enamel has survived so
well over all these years. Did
you ever wear it?
GUEST: A couple of times, yeah.
APPRAISER: Oh, yeah? GUEST: I
just, I'm always worried I would
lose it.
APPRAISER: Right, yeah, I can
imagine. And you never saw,
like,
whoever gave it to you
wearing it? Or anybo...
GUEST: My grandmother wore it,
and then my mother wore it.
APPRAISER: They took excellent
care of it, that's great.
GUEST: Yeah, thanks.
APPRAISER: This one has, in the
middle, old-European-cut
diamonds,
which was very indicative of the
type of diamond cut you would
see in that era.
A really fun piece is, is
that one of them is loose.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And kind of moves
around a little bit. (chuckles)
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: And what did you say
your grandmother called that?
GUEST: Drops of dew.
APPRAISER: Drops of
dew on the pansies.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: That's awesome.
And you can see that it moves
inside the petals. Did you ever
try to find a signature on it?
GUEST: I did. And I was never
able to find one. It was marked
in the family's provenance as a
Tiffany. So I'm, like, it's
gotta be here somewhere, and I
just could never find it.
APPRAISER: Yeah, it, it wasn't
easy to find. (chuckles) It's
on the back of one of the
stems and it's textured.
GUEST: Ah.
APPRAISER: Making it more
difficult to find. This is back
when Louis Comfort
Tiffany was running the company
and the designs, Tiffany
Studios.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: I'm not sure if they
actually designed this one or
they retailed it-- they would do
a
little bit of both. So the
signature's on there. Also, the
diamonds are a pretty good size.
GUEST: Right. APPRAISER: Most
of the pansy brooches I see
have a much smaller diamond,
anywhere from about a tenth of a
carat, maybe slightly larger.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Each one of these
is about a quarter of a carat.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Nice size. Also, of
course, being from Tiffany...
GUEST: Right. APPRAISER:
...very good-quality diamonds.
GUEST: (chuckles) Right.
APPRAISER: When I was doing a
little research on this, the
much smaller versions
were selling at retail for
around $5,000. But this is not
the same thing. This has much
larger
diamonds of much finer quality,
and that Tiffany thing takes us
the extra mile. I would suspect
that in a retail situation, you
could easily get $15,000 to
$20,000 for this.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: Yeah.
GUEST: That's excellent.
(chuckles) Thank you so much.
APPRAISER: Thanks for bringing
it in, it'’’s a great-looking
piece.
GUEST: Yeah.