When Christine Crawford, daughter of actress Joan, decided to dispose of her mother's collection of domed rings from the forties, she contacted Barrett-Smythe, a New York City-based jewelry store specializing in fine vintage jewelry. "Everyone loves provenance, the piece with a past behind it," says JoAnna Mendelson, owner of Barrett-Smythe. "We obtained permission to sell them as Crawford's personal rings, and all three of them - diamonds and sapphires, diamonds and rubies, and diamonds and emeralds - went to one of our more flamboyant, fashionable clients who avidly collects jewels."
Other important pieces in the shop's current inventory include a pink gold watch with a hidden face, made for ballet dancer Vera Zorina (one of choreographer George Balanchine's wives) by Harry Lackritz, a prominent Chicago jeweler in the forties, and the smallest watch in the world, identical to the watch worn by Queen Elizabeth II at her coronation. Featuring a quarter-inch face, this Jaeger-LeCoultre watch is cast in a solid block of platinum and attached to a diamond and platinum band.
The LeCoultre piece originally surfaced through one of Mendelson's buyers in London, who found it in a parcel of low-value items offered at a flea market auction. "We opened the watch up and discovered it was a LeCoultre," recalls Mendelson. "We gave the numbers to LeCoultre, and it was then we learned that only two of these watches were ever made. It was truly like finding a Rembrandt in the cellar. If the movement alone were duplicated today, it would cost nearly as much as the vintage watch. I understand Princess Diana owns a similar watch in gold."
Mendelson's Showroom
Mendelson opened her store - a tiny showroom located in a marble-columned brick townhouse a few blocks off Lexington Avenue - in 1989. Laura Ashley floral wallpaper and nineteenth-century pine vitrines displaying jewels created for and by Buccellati, Van Cleef & Arpels, Tiffany, Bulgari, David Webb, and others give the shop a definite English feel to complement its decidedly English name. "My mother once had an interior decorator named David Barrett-Smith. I loved the name, and it stuck with me. I changed the Smith to Smythe to make it more English, in keeping with the London feel of the shop."
Mendelson became interested in jewelry through her husband, who is in the wholesale end of the business. "I wanted to try my hand at establishing a retail presence with vintage jewelry. The pieces I don't sell in three months, I can send somewhere else, selling them to wholesalers who will in turn sell them to other shops." More and more that means Europe. "The market shifts back and forth with the country that's doing less well economically becoming a supplier. Right now the United States is selling a lot of pieces back to Europe because the Europeans have more money to expend on luxury items. These pieces will always be in circulation. That's the wonderful thing about estate jewelry, it just keeps changing hands."
The popularity of vintage jewelry is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the early seventies, jewelers sold classic pieces from Mendelson's eras of specialization - the twenties through the fifties - for their breakup value, even though the settings were often magnificent, one-of-a-kind works of art. Platinum and gold settings were melted down, land the diamonds, rubies, and
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