David Webb and Sotheby’s unveil gold jewelry for America’s 250th year

Sotheby’s and David Webb unveiled Sotheby’s X David Webb: Mavericks On Madison Avenue, a summer presentation that opens July 1 at 945 Madison Avenue and runs through August 16 as part of the house’s 250 Years of American Art & Culture season. Placed inside America’s semiquincentennial calendar, the exhibition reads as a compact history of gold jewelry made the American way: bold, sculptural, and unapologetically urban.

David Webb’s own history gives that framing weight. Born in Asheville, North Carolina, on July 2, 1925, he moved to New York at 17 and founded his eponymous company there in 1948. The house says its archive holds more than 40,000 original renderings, records and design ideas, and its own timeline shows how early the signature language was set, from the first animal bracelet in 1957 to the textured gold and animal motifs highlighted in the 75th-anniversary collection.

That continuity is visible in the pieces Sotheby’s assembled. The Delacorte Suite appears in a yellow-gold setting with aquamarines and diamonds, while the emerald Cross River ring, shown publicly for the first time in photographs, and the coral Couture choker push the palette outward without abandoning Webb’s taste for volume and color. The edit treats gold as a framework rather than a backdrop, letting stones sit inside hard-edged, high-relief forms that feel as much New York as jewelry.

Frank Everett, Sotheby’s vice chairman of jewelry, called the exhibition a full-circle moment, since his first assignment at the firm was writing a catalogue note for a Webb jewel. He said Webb’s zebra bracelets remain a recurring point of fascination for buyers, and he singled out the Anchor brooch, built with faceted sapphires and emeralds and cabochon rubies, as his favorite in the selection. That blend of animal fantasy, vivid color and engineered gold has kept Webb’s work in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Newark Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Christie’s has placed Webb among the most important American jewelers of the 20th century, and the list of women who wore his work, Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Diana Vreeland and Doris Duke among them, shows how thoroughly his jewelry entered the language of American style. At Sotheby’s, that legacy was not treated as nostalgia but as a living gold vocabulary, still sharp enough to anchor the 250th year of American art and culture.