Antiques Roadshow guest learns diamond brooches worth $60k

At a filmed event for the cult TV show in Wales, expert Geoffrey Munn, a jewellery historian, inspected a number of pieces of jewellery that featured dazzling rubies and diamonds from the 1700s.

Explaining how the jewellery came to be in her possession, the guest said: “Well, the two diamond brooches were given to me by my father”.

“(The smaller bow) on my wedding day. (The floral brooch) came a little bit later, and (the ruby-encrusted bow) was inherited from my grandmother.

“My father was in the antiques world, so it’s something that I’ve grown up with.”

Having inspected the pieces, Mr Munn said they were “18th century jewels of the finest pitch, in perfect condition”, before giving a brief history of each.

Of the smaller bow, he said: “The bow is not simply a bow. It’s a true lovers knot, because the harder it is pulled, the tighter it becomes. And the diamonds are forever, so this little subliminal message for your wedding was perfectly well chosen”.

The ruby encrusted bow, he said, carried the same message, while the floral brooch was “more complicated”.

“It’s almost certainly a dress ornament … There may have been 20 or 30 of them, and they might have gone down the back of a woman of very high rank and huge wealth,” Mr Munn explained of the flower-shaped piece.

“(In the 18th Century), people didn’t simply recognise the sovereign because there was no photography and precious few portraits. So, when (royalty) entered the room, there had to be an enormous display of sumptuary.”

The brooch could even have belonged to Russian royalty, Mr Munn added.

“I would like to think that it was Russian, and that would be very, very exciting,” he said.

“The Russian crown jewels were sold in London after the revolution to raise funds for the new regime. It’s just possible that this is a Russian crown jewel. Wouldn’t be marvellous?”

The antiques expert priced the smaller bow brooch at £8000 ($A15,000), the ruby brooch at £10,000 ($A18,800) and the diamond floral brooch at a staggering £15,000 ($A28,300).

He said the whole collection was worth up to $A62,000.

“They’re marvellous things. They’re not showy. They’re utterly beautiful expressions of an era gone by and that’s what we’re looking for,” Mr Munn said.

The guest said she enjoyed wearing the pieces, but the bigger brooches were “difficult to wear nowadays … perhaps a bit more dated“.

The collection would be inherited by her daughters, she added.

Also featured on the episode was a dazzling porcelain egg made by the Royal Porcelain Factory in Berlin and a “vanishingly rare” 17th Century tobacco box, valued at up to $A8500.

Earlier this year, Antiques Roadshow experts confirmed a tiny piece of Australian history, verifying that a small bronze Buddha statue discovered on a West Australian beach was an authentic Ming Dynasty relic.

The tiny statue could be the smoking gun that proved Chinese sailors touched down in Australia centuries before Europeans did, the experts said.