Sotheby's to auction Maurice Tempelsman's gold boxes and jewelry in New York

Gold boxes are taking center stage in Maurice Tempelsman’s collection, where a rare Steinkabinett box from around 1770 is set to anchor Sotheby’s June 24 sale in New York. The single-owner auction brings 129 lots of fine art, antiquities, gold boxes, objects of vertu, rare books, furniture and jewelry to market, with the exhibition running June 12 to June 24. For collectors, the appeal is not only the estimate, but the workmanship, historic ownership and goldsmithing detail that turn these objects into portable works of art.

The headline lot is a gold and hardstone Steinkabinett box attributed to Christian Gottlieb Stiehl of Dresden, estimated at $600,000 to $800,000. Sotheby’s says the box was unseen by the public for more than 60 years, and that only 10 were made in Stiehl’s career, a level of rarity that places it well beyond ordinary decorative collecting. Inside is a concealed booklet titled Catalogue de toutes Sortes de Pierres qui se trouvent en Saxe, a reminder that Enlightenment luxury often fused ornament with scientific curiosity. That kind of hidden detail is exactly what serious buyers now prize: not just gold, but evidence of an artisan’s mind at work.

Tempelsman’s sale also reaches into the intimate world of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whose gifts and bequests add another layer of provenance. Sotheby’s is offering an authentic reproduction of her 1997 will, which mentions leaving Tempelsman a Greek alabaster head of a woman, and a yellow-gold Cartier Tank Louis wristwatch reportedly gifted to him around 1985 and estimated at $10,000 to $15,000. Those pieces are modest beside the Stiehl box in value, but they carry something equally potent in the market: direct association with a storied collector and one of the best-known women of the 20th century.

Tempelsman himself helps explain why the collection resonates. Born in 1929, the Belgian-American diamond magnate died in August 2025 at 95 after a career that included leadership at Lazare Kaplan International Inc. and service as chairman of the Corporate Council on Africa in two separate periods. The Academy of American Poets also lists him as a former board member. In the auction room, that biography matters because provenance is not just a footnote, it is part of the object’s value. A gold box with an identifiable maker, a documented history and a lifetime of distinguished ownership now commands the same attention once reserved for major jewelry lots, and that shift is exactly what makes this sale so timely.