Woman Buys Secondhand Brooch for Rp500,000, Then Fetches Rp189 Million

A silver brooch bought more than three decades ago at an antiques fair in the English Midlands for about £20 by Flora Steel, an art historian, has surged in value. Steel wore it on the lapel of one of her favourite coats for several years, then kept it in a cabinet for two decades. In 2024, her brooch was sold for £9,500 (about Rp189.76 million) to a private collector at Gildings Auctioneers in Market Harborough, England. The brooch is made of silver, lapis lazuli, bronze and pink coral.

‘This brooch caught my eye because of its striking design—the use of the stones is beautiful,’ said Steel, who has been collecting silver jewellery since the age of 13.

She is the third person to sell a William Burges brooch through Gildings Auctioneers. One of the other brooches sold for £31,000 in 2011 (about Rp790.70 million at the time).

Burges, famed for designing Cardiff Castle in Wales, made the brooches for the weddings of two of his friends in 1864. Gildings explains this via sketches of the original brooch that are housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The Steel brooch, which bears the Gothic Victorian aesthetic, is inscribed with the initials ‘JCG’, the initials of Reverend John Gibson, a cleric-scholar, and Caroline Bendyshe, a niece of Admiral Lord Nelson.

‘If the sketch pages are missing, the link between the piece and its designer would be completely erased from the historical record,’ said Will Gilding, director at Gildings.

Steel, who is English but lives in Rome, was delighted to learn that she possessed a brooch that had long vanished and was highly valued. Her ownership provided the relief she needed after two years of treatment for breast cancer.

Following successful treatment, she plans to donate part of her proceeds to breast cancer research, give some to her son, and perhaps set aside some for a five-day horse-riding trip through Tuscany and for a visit to the San Carlo Opera House in Naples.