Featured CAMEOS: Show & Tell or Ask & Answer

THANK YOU!

That's a beauty.

Until you posted the broken man shell in silver, the one I bought is the first I'd ever seen. It's probably the reason I won.

 

I'm quite fond of this lady, who has been patched with gold at the sides. One also sees shell cameos that have had all of the brown background broken away & the remaining figure set in a minimal mount with wire spokes that wrap around from the back & hold the cameo with what look like prongs from the front.

This rescue astounds me. The background has been broken away and the cameo glued onto glass that conforms precisely to the curvature.

 

The lady is gorgeous. I have seen many unmounted cameos where it's just the carving. But, I thought that's just the way they were made. The guy that makes mine does them in odd shapes. He's working on one now. I hope he has it done soon, there's a whole other process it has to go through after he's done, and that's going to take time.

 

Contemporary cameo cutters are much less bound by convention than were their predecessors, and of course they can call on technology not available previously. When you see a typical Victorian Flora or bacchante sans background, you can be fairly certain you are looking at a salvaged piece.

 

Every time the price of gold reaches a new high unmounted cameos flood the market. People sell cameos for the scrap value of the mount

 

This began already quite some time ago. Nowadays I'm seeing auction lots of 20 - 30 unset cameos, usually most of them no great loss to the world, but here & there will be a good piece that may never be in wearable condition again.

The price of gold is completely distorting the market; now it's more about settings than quality of carving: a gold mount with a cameo instead of a cameo in a gold mount.

 

(sigh)

 

sidebar.........

I offered some gold watches to an auction house , suggesting a reserve of 15% above melt weight.
They didn't like that thinking on my part , telling me how the gold value was messing with the timepiece market , and refused to take my items.....

 

On the other hand: 14K? Throw the bums out!

 

Unmount the Ugly Stepsisters!

 

I would pass those by, they're horrible. My wife would not look at the cameos, she'd check to see if it's 14k, and if they were and they were a dollar, she'd buy them.

My eyesight isn't good enough to be looking for gold or silver markings.

 

I call these hatchet faces because they look like they were cut with a hatchet. There is no reason for them to exist, IMO.

 

I don't understand why someone would set those in 14K!

 

No idea, but the cameos themselves would look great on Halloween.

 

if u look closely....u can almost see the woman getting slapped in the face......

I'd crush them out of existence !

 

Looks like they were once earring dangles. Hope someone put something nicer in their place. Honestly. Do jewellery designers & manufacturers have no standards at all when it comes to cameos? I won't say I see this all the time, but often enough.

 

I see it every weekend. I like to think it's cameo carvers in training.

 

I've seen so many of these I think they must come over by the shipping container full. Suspect a practiced hand can turn one out in no more than 10 minutes. I suppose it could be people learning, trying to get better, or could just be specialists in cheap small cameos for tasteless jewellery designers.

 

I knew as soon as I saw it whose signature would be on the back. So typical of Schmoll: an ambitious, possibly original subject, with less than masterly execution.





https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/...link&queryId=118e5fff46420dac3e3ad6bb3402c958

 

If my plate wasn't full, I'd bid on that. It's beautiful. It almost has a Picasso feel to the face. I'm not a Picasso fan. But, in this cameo it works. Of course this was done before Picasso was born. There's enough detail to the rest that shows this carver had talent and cared for the craft.