The wide gold Victorian bangle was decorated with an enameled angel in a pink robe, its left arm linked to the word “Souvenir,” inlaid with rose-cut diamonds. Inside was an inscription: Pour Armelle en souvenir de Jacquot Noël 1992 (In English, For Armelle in memory of Jacquot Christmas 1992).
It was Karl Lagerfeld’s gift to the mother of his partner, Jacques de Bascher, who had died in 1989. And early last month it was sitting on a linen-covered tray, priced at 25,000 euros ($29,255), at Kunsthandel Inez Stodel, an antique jewelry store in Amsterdam.
“It would be a great piece without a provenance,” said Leonore van der Waals, the gallery’s owner and the daughter of its eponymous founder, who had discovered the bangle at an auction. “If you know the story, though, it is even more special. Already within one generation, the history of a piece can be forgotten.”
Ms. van der Waals, 51, wants to protect such histories. She is an expert in jewelry dating to the 17th century and is especially fond of what she calls “sentimental jewelry” — items made to convey messages of love, loss or longing, such as the Lagerfeld bangle. and a gold needle holder with tiny arrowheads coming out of its lid. “These are ‘amors’ arrows,” she said.
Often such pieces are bought by collectors, but Ms. van der Waals said the store is not focused solely on specialty items. “I like to buy unique pieces, but most people like more basic jewelry, like for example the Cartier Love bangle, so I also want to offer alternatives to that,” she said. “This could be a gold Bulgari bone bracelet from the 1980s or a Victorian piece that is so timeless, you can wear it forever. My mother never bought basic, but I have a much wider audience from all over the world, also through Instagram.”
As an only child, Ms. van der Waals said, she spent a lot of time around the gallery, but she initially decided to study law: “I just wanted to do something normal and rational. Inez is such an extravagant person; I just wanted to fit in.”
After five years of working at a corporate law firm, she realized “that was totally not me.” So she officially joined her mother’s business in 2004 and several years ago began assuming control from her mother, who will soon turn 87.
Ms. Stodel’s own career was linked to her father, Piet Stodel, who opened an antiques store in the Dutch port of Rotterdam after World War II. “He dealt in everything: sculpture, porcelain, Oceanica and other specialized objects,” Ms. van der Waals said, adding that a young Inez helped him around the store.
“She used to travel with him and later I used to travel with her to buy jewelry. That’s how we both learned: by seeing, touching, and looking,” Ms. van der Waals said. “My mother wasn’t an educator but she gave me the eye to really look for beautiful things.”
In 1964, Ms. Stodel opened her 215-square-foot (20-square-meter) gallery on the ground floor of a 19th-century building on Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, a street in Amsterdam’s canal district renowned for its antique dealers. At first the shop was an outpost of her father’s store but, from 1971 on, Ms. Stodel focused solely on antique jewelry, attracting such clients as Marie-Hélène and Guy de Rothschild, Kirk Douglas and Oscar de la Renta.
Jaap Bakema, an influential Dutch postwar architect, designed the gallery’s interior. He left the original dark brown parquet in place, painted the ceiling dark brown, covered the walls with white wood chip wallpaper and installed glass vitrines. Ms. van der Waals has left it all largely unchanged.
On this particular day, she took some pieces from the displays and put them on the linen-covered tray for examination, including a perfectly circular Etruscan Revival gold pendant with a glass micromosaic of a dove by the 19th-century goldsmith Fortunato Pio Castellani (€22,000).
There also was a surprisingly modern-looking gold ring that actually was circa 1785, set with an octagonal blue glass panel and a large cushion-cut diamond (€12,500). She explained it was a Bague à l’Enfantement, or birth ring, “These type of rings were in fashion after Marie Antoinette gave birth to Louis XVI’s child, the Dauphin, after 11 years of marriage,” she said. “They were worn by men and women.”
“The quality of antique jewelry,” Ms. van der Waals added, “is so much higher than most of the jewelry you can buy today” — although she did acknowledge that high jewelry collections display excellent craftsmanship. “But I am probably too Dutch for that,” she said. “I want my jewelry to be wearable.”
Over the decades, Ms. Stodel and Ms. van der Waals have sold many pieces to museums. In 1987, for example, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam purchased a horn and gold hair comb set with diamonds representing two viburnum branches and guelder rose blossoms, made by the French jeweler and glass artist René Lalique between 1902 and 1903. In a book the gallery published last year to mark its 60th year, Suzanne van Leeuwen, the Rijksmuseum’s conservator of jewelry, described the piece as “one of the highlights of the jewelry collection.”
More recently Ms. van der Waals has been working with Alexandra Mazzanti Baldi, an art adviser, curator and gallerist who plans to open in mid-2026 what Ms. Mazzanti describes as “a petit musée de la femme,” or little museum of the woman, in the Palazzo Valier in Venice, the headquarters of Ms. Mazzanti’s Maddalena Di Giacomo Foundation.
She has bought three late 18th-century rings with sentimental themes from Ms. van der Waals. “I love to collaborate with Leonore, because she has exquisite taste and cares about where the pieces are going,” she said. “She researches what she offers; she digs into stories. There are few dealers who have this mission; many are just merchants.”
The women had known each other only online for the past six years, then Ms. Mazzanti traveled to Amsterdam in May. “It was surprisingly moving to see how the personality of the dealer then becomes the space,” she said. “For some it might be a shop, but for me it is an art gallery.
“She is in the first line of preservation for this cultural history that belongs to art, fashion and to sentiments, and that might otherwise get lost.”
The post A Jewelry Dealer’s Search for ‘Beautiful Things’ appeared first on New York Times.
