Sotheby's to sell Maurice Tempelsman's jewels, including Jackie Kennedy Onassis gift
Sotheby’s will sell Maurice Tempelsman’s Cartier Tank Louis from Jackie Kennedy Onassis, alongside rare gold boxes, a Stiehl tabatiere and an Egyptian snake armlet.
A Cartier Tank Louis with an engraved case back, gifted by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis around 1985, gives Sotheby’s sale of Maurice Tempelsman’s belongings its sharpest human edge: a watch that once moved through one of America’s most watched social circles will now cross the auction block in New York. The collection, titled A Marvelous Journey: The Collection of Maurice Tempelsman, will be offered June 24, 2026, with public viewing in New York from June 17 to June 23.
The catalog, which lists 11 lots, reads like a compact biography in precious materials. Sotheby’s has grouped together fine art, antiquities, gold boxes and objects of vertu, but the jewelry and personal effects are the pieces that reveal Tempelsman most clearly. One highlight is a magnificent and rare gold and hardstone Steinkabinett tabatiere by Christian Gottlieb Stiehl, made in Dresden around 1770. Another is a gold-and-basse-taille enamel snuff box from Paris dated 1748/1749, joined by a gold snuff box by Louis Métayer of Amsterdam from 1747. Together they point to a collector who valued not just sheen, but workmanship, city by city, workshop by workshop.
That taste extends beyond the European goldsmith tradition. The sale also includes an 18-karat gold and hematite acorn dress set by Schlumberger for Tiffany & Co., a small but telling object from the 20th century’s midcentury luxury vocabulary, when costume and precious materials met in designs made for exacting dressers. An Egyptian gold snake armlet from the Roman period, circa 1st century B.C. to 1st century A.D., pushes the story further back, reminding buyers that Tempelsman’s collecting moved easily between eras as well as continents.
Tempelsman died in Manhattan on August 23, 2025, at 95. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution described him as a politically connected Belgian-American diamond magnate and one of the world’s premier diamond merchants, with deep ties to newly decolonized African nations such as Ghana and Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. It also noted his closeness to John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. That background gives the sale its resonance: these are not anonymous luxury objects, but remnants of a life lived through diamonds, diplomacy and travel, with the Jackie Kennedy Onassis watch serving as the most legible link between private ornament and public history.
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