Christie’s Exceptional Sale Sets The Bar At $5.5 Million: A Rare Tea Set, A Roman Cameo Of Emperor Claudius, And A $2 Million Transcontinental Railroad Spike

The country’s premier applied and decorative arts auction concluded on January 27, and the news in terms of the reserves and estimates was bright. Collectors were out in force. The leading lots were for the most part healthily bid, and the 29-lot sale brought in $5,589,240.

Pictured below, the stars of the show included a Roman cameo of Emperor Claudius, formerly part of the renowned 18th-century gem collection of the Dukes of Marlborough (otherwise known as the owners of Blenheim Palace). Estimated at $300,00-to-$500,000, it went for $352,800. Pictured top, the extremely idiosyncratic gold-and-silver-clad commemorative Transcontinental Railroad Spike, actually used in the ceremony of the railroad being joined on 1869 and in impeccable shape for a chunk of festooned iron, drew a bracing $2,220,000 from a clearly history-obsessed bidder, just a little over four times its upper estimate of a half million dollars. It was the night’s leader among some truly fine examples of the decorative arts.

The Emperors of Prussia, in the form of an extraordinary late-nineteenth-century Hohenzollern tea set, fared almost as well, as its high end estimate was a bargain at $150,000 but it rang in just about three times that, at $441,000. It was commissioned for the wedding of Prince William II of Prussia (later Emperor of Germany), and then came up for auction in the 1950s in Berlin.