Maurice Tempelsman Auction to Include Gifts from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Three millennia of objets d’art will also be sold from the estate of the former first lady’s companion
Maurice Tempelsman, who died last year at the age of 95, was many things—a philanthropist, an immigrant, a merchant, a collector—but he is most remembered in the public mind as the discreet late-life romantic companion of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. His collection, assembled over decades, will be up for auction at Sotheby’s New York on June 24. It contains a plethora of gorgeously crafted 18th-century snuffboxes, a Ptolemaic gold snake armband, a drawing by Paul Klee, Renaissance jewelry, and a Robert Frederick Blum painting of the entry to the Grand Canal in Venice, but the items likeliest to cause a stir are six lots with provenance linked to the former first lady.
The Kennedy-linked items are rooted in Jackie O.’s legendarily exquisite taste and her appetite for art. There’s an Ancient Greek alabaster head that she loved and left to Tempelsman in her will. On a personal note, there are two of her lighthearted sketches, one of a horse and the other a quick interpretation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. There are also gifts that she gave him: a Cartier watch and a Jean Schlumberger for Tiffany & Co. gold and pearl dress set.
The snuffboxes are also a noteworthy assemblage: in particular, there is a gold and gardstone “Steinkabinett” box by Christian Gottlieb Stiehl valued at $600,000–800,000, last available for auction in 1906. “To have a Stiehl Steinkabinett of this quality and condition reappear in public after nearly a century is a true discovery,” says Alexandra Starp, Head of Vertu and Gold Boxes at Sotheby’s, adding, “It is not only an object of breathtaking beauty, but a masterpiece rooted in history and science that transcends the boundaries of any single collecting category.”
