Glamorous brooch with diamonds in gold & platinum, circa 1950

The brooch made of high-carat yellow gold looks as light as a real feather, that's how soft it appears. And yet, weighing around twenty grams and set with sixty-one diamonds, it is an impressively precious object. The desire to adorn ourselves with feathers is as old as man himself. Decorating hats, fans, accessories and entire dresses with feathers was all the rage in Europe at the end of the 19th century. Feathers from exotic birds were particularly popular, as hardly any hat was complete without heron feathers, the long tail feathers of birds of paradise or the bushy feathers of ostriches - some over a metre long, some tiny and in all the colors of the rainbow. In 1886, Frank Chapman, an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, determined that 542 out of 700 hats worn by ladies in New York had feathers or even whole birds attached. At that time, an estimated five million birds were killed annually for the sole purpose of providing feathers for fashion items. In 1892, a single shipment for a feather store in London consisted of the feathers of around 6,000 birds of paradise, 40,000 hummingbirds and 360,000 birds from the Caribbean. Fortunately, the beautiful feather-shaped brooch is not made from the exotic feathers of an endangered bird, but shines in brilliantly polished gold. The small octagonal diamonds sit in settings of light platinum. The brooch was created around 1950 and is still very much in the tradition of late Art Deco. Now it is waiting to adorn a blazer for an exciting premiere, a beautiful evening dress for a cocktail evening or a pretty costume for an elegant dinner - without a guilty conscience!

Estimate:$4,824.29

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