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Purple Gemstones – The Color of Royalty Resurgent

Purple Gemstones - The Color of Royalty Resurgent

For most of recorded human history, purple was the original power color. It was the color of kings, queens, emperors and royalty. In the 1st century AD, Roman emperor Nero not only decreed that purple garments were reserved solely for the emperor, but also that trade in any purple items was banned – on pain of death!

In the 6th century AD, when an uncontrollable riot almost forced the Byzantine emperor Justinian I to flee, his consort, the empress Theodora, gave him courage by boldly declaring that “Royal purple is the noblest shroud.” Royalty has jealously guarded the majesty of purple for millennia.

For ancient and medieval peoples, purple represented the very pinnacle of color, a natural pairing to sovereigns. And no gem dripped more decadently with that elusive, royal color than coveted amethyst. The ancient Greeks believed the purple stone could prevent intoxication. In fact, amethyst comes from the Greek term “not drunk.” For centuries, amethyst was one of the most expensive gems on the planet, considered the equal of diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds.

All that changed in the early 19th century, however, when massive deposits of the previously rare gem were found in Brazil. Prices plummeted almost overnight. By the late Victorian era, amethyst was considered far too plebian for the jewelry of the aristocracy, much less that of royalty, although it was still employed in some fine Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau jewelry.

The second half of the 20th century was even less kind to once coveted purple gemstones. Calibre-cut amethysts were often used as inexpensive additions to low-value, mass-produced tennis bracelets, earrings and cocktail rings. Amethyst’s harrowing descent from noblest gem to lowly bauble mirrored purple’s demotion from the color of royalty to just another banal hue.

Fine jewelry largely ignored purple gemstones throughout most of the 20th century, instead gravitating towards the bold, thrilling reds of rubies, the enigmatic, soothing blues of sapphires and the dazzling, brilliant white of diamonds. But then a funny thing happened. It gradually dawned on gemstone connoisseurs that three exceptionally fine stones came in purple: sapphire, spinel and tanzanite.

One of the many different hues of fancy sapphire, purple sapphire had been inexplicably overlooked by the gem industry for many decades. Sapphire, with its incredible brilliance, fire and hardness, is the consummate colored gem. So it isn’t surprising that a renewed interest in purple sapphire has recently brought this ravishing gem to the forefront of fashion. This newfound enthusiasm has pushed purple sapphire prices skyward. Whereas 1 carat stones used to trade for around $50 per carat, now you would be very lucky to find decent stones at $200 or $300 a carat.

Purple sapphire’s sister stone, purple spinel, has also seen a wave of interest in the last couple of decades. In addition to being almost as hard and tough as sapphire, spinel possesses a rare and treasured trait among colored gemstones; it is never treated. This means that every (non-synthetic) spinel is an all-natural stone, mined directly from the earth with no need for artificial enhancements to bring out its tremendous beauty. These underrated gemstones are a bargain compared to purple sapphire, with fine specimens still available at under $100 a carat.

Tanzanite is a relative newcomer to the world’s stage. Only discovered in 1967, tanzanite is a striking violet-blue stone that is mined in only one location on earth – Tanzania. The gem’s similarity in color to blue sapphire – except with a strong hint of purple – has made it a hit among gem collectors and jewelry lovers alike.

In fact, the gem is so beautiful that the first company to promote the new gem shortly after its discovery was none other than renowned luxury house Tiffany & Co. Sadly for tanzanite enthusiasts, experts estimate that its single source mines have perhaps only 15 to 20 years of production left before they are completely exhausted.

As recently as 20 years ago, all purple gemstones was invariably assumed to be a cheap and garish amethyst. Consequently, purple gemstone jewelry was largely viewed as mundane costume jewelry. But this misinformed attitude is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Today’s high power purple gemstones – sapphire, spinel and tanzanite – are all exceedingly rare, incredibly desirable and more popular than they’ve ever been before. Purple gems are back, but this time around they aren’t just for royalty.

World War I – A Break with the Past

World War I - A Break with the Past

There are few points in history that have been as decisive as World War I. The world before The Great War was unambiguously Euro-centric. Western Europe, in addition to having the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations on earth, had cultivated vast colonies that spanned the globe.

Covering over 22% of the earth’s land area and encompassing fully 20% of its population, the sun never set on the British Empire. The expansive French colonies stretched over vast swaths of Africa, Southeast Asia and numerous smaller territories. Germany had fledgling colonies in Africa and the South Pacific. Even the tiny countries of Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands each held significant overseas possessions. The U.S., in comparison, was still considered a cultural, if not technological, backwater.

In many ways, the world before World War I was a direct outgrowth of medieval feudal European history. Kings, Emperors, Kaisers and Czars ruled these kingdoms just as their ancestors had done for centuries before them. In a world of distinct and largely rigid social classes, being a member of nobility had real meaning. In fact, only two nations in the entirety of Europe – both well ahead of their time – didn’t have monarchs in the first decade of the 20th century: The Swiss Confederation and the Republic of France.

Technologically, the period immediately following 1914 was far more transformative than the centuries that preceded it. Before World War I people traveled by horse and carriage, train and, if traveling overseas, by boat. Cars were still rare – a plaything of the rich – and most people had never seen an airplane, much less ridden in one. Likewise, the telephone and wireless telegraph (radio) were still in their infancy before the Great War, available only to the rich. The roaring 1920s was really the decade when telecommunications really became available to the masses.

When World War I finally arrived it shattered the old world order irreparably. As the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey ominously commented at the time, “The lamps are going out all over Europe.” As the war ground to its brutal conclusion the centuries old empires of Czarist Russia and Austro-Hungary collapsed with shocking suddenness. The defeated German Kaiser abdicated in humiliation, fleeing to exile in Holland. Republics sprang up like weeds in the aftermath of the war, particularly in Eastern Europe. Suddenly, monarchy didn’t seem as necessary anymore, as if the natural political order of the universe had been overturned.

World War I marked the beginning of the end of European Exceptionalism, monarchism and colonialism. Sure, the British and French Empires, among others, lingered on into the 1920s and 1930s. But the inter-war period was a hazy dream-time of wistful denial on the part of Europeans; in reality their empires had been fatally wounded.

Imperial subjects from India to Vietnam to Algeria gradually became ever more aware of their national identities. Nationalism that had been sporadic and ill-organized before the Great War suddenly became an irresistible force, inevitably tearing these empires asunder. The great European empires could not – and did not – long survive these developments. The world after 1914 was never the same.

The Joy of Old Growth Timber

The Joy of Old Growth Timber

Old growth timber is loosely defined as any wood harvested from a tree that has fully matured in a highly competitive forest environment over more than a century, with no meaningful human interference. Trees growing in undisturbed forests are subjected to intense competition for water, sunlight and soil nutrients. This results in very slow growing trees that have very dense growth rings.

This matters to the antique aficionado because, as I discovered first-hand, old growth wood is superior in every way to “new” wood. And this is especially the case when that new wood has been harvested from a commercial tree plantation, a situation that is rapidly becoming the norm today.

A few years ago I purchased a house that was built in 1913. As part of remodeling the kitchen, I refinished some white-pine built-in cupboards. These well-made pieces were original to the house – about 100 years old. As part of the refinishing process, I sanded down, re-stained and sealed the old, ruined finish. In all, I estimate I spent somewhere between 100 and 125 hours restoring these wonderful built-ins. During that painstaking process, I discovered something very interesting; old growth timber is a joy to work with.

The ease of working with old growth wood wasn’t something that was apparent to me at first. That only happened after I sanded and finished some new white pine boards fresh from Home Depot as part of the remodel. This new, Home Depot wood didn’t sand well, even when using the same equipment and sandpaper as on the old built-ins.

The new boards’ finished surfaces were always “fuzzy”, regardless of how much care I took in sanding or how fine the grit on the sandpaper was. The new, Home Depot wood warped with shocking regularity, splintered easily and rarely took stain evenly. In short, the modern pine was a nightmare to work with.

In contrast, the pine from the century old built-ins was almost effortless to work with. The tight, even grain meant the old growth pine sanded uniformly and rarely splintered. The cabinets took a remarkably smooth, almost glass-like finish and accepted stain evenly. When I had finally finished, a family member even commented that the now fully restored cabinets looked as if they had been made from expensive black cherry, rather than pedestrian white pine. And it was true; they were gorgeous.

Old growth timber of any given species is denser, harder and stronger than the same species of lumber harvested from a managed stand or farm. It is more insect and rot resistant. It also possesses far superior dimensional stability, with much less warping and checking than modern wood. Old growth wood often has a more fully figured grain pattern and richer color. And as if all that wasn’t enough, old growth timber can often be found in larger sizes, especially widths, than mass-market, plantation harvested wood.

The connoisseur of fine antiques is in luck. Almost all wood harvested before the early 20th century was old growth timber. This means that any antiques incorporating wood made before that time – like furniture, frames for paintings or some objets d’art – contain the best of the best – old growth wood.

However, there is still a small supply of old growth lumber harvested today. Although uncommon, some fine temperate hardwoods like oak, maple, birch and cherry may still be cut from undisturbed forests, thus possessing all the treasured attributes of wonderful old growth wood. A few tropical hardwoods like rosewood, mahogany and teak may also be old growth, but, due to over-harvesting in the wild, nearly all of these exotic woods are now plantation grown. Softwoods, with pine being the foremost example, are now almost exclusively plantation grown.

My parents own an antique Chippendale drop-front walnut desk from the late 18th century. It was undoubtedly constructed from old growth black walnut – some of its boards easily exceed two feet in width. The desk has taken on a beautifully rich, deep chocolate brown patina over the last two centuries.

Amazingly, the walnut trees used in the creation of this desk were seedlings in the late 16th or early 17th century. And the only reason they weren’t older is because black walnut isn’t a very long lived tree species. My parent’s drop-front Chippendale desk, like every piece of antique furniture made before the 20th century, partakes in the many blessings of old growth timber. Astute collectors and investors should strive to understand and cherish antiques created from this wonder material.

The Twilight of the British Empire – The Interwar Years

The Twilight of the British Empire - The Interwar Years

The period between World War I and World War II was the fading dream-time of the British Empire. While the Great War exacted a terrible price from all participants, Great Britain alone among the major European powers seemed to exit the struggle unbowed. It had triumphed over the Germans, its imperial possessions and great power status fully intact. Indeed, the British Empire reached its maximum geographical extent in 1921, but all was not as it seemed.

In reality, Great Britain, Europe’s greatest power, had been bled dry by the war. The country was forced to abandon the gold standard in 1914 with the commencement of war. Although it briefly reestablished pre-war gold parity in 1925, it came at a crippling price. Not only did Britain suffer almost continuous recession until the mid 1930s, but the pound sterling was also increasingly displaced as the world’s reserve currency by the U.S. dollar.

Great Britain had become a paper tiger and yet throughout the interwar period the British elite pretended as if nothing had changed. Their perception of themselves was so bound up in the fabric of grand empire that its illusion was maintained at all costs.

The British still called India “the jewel in the imperial crown” even as it became increasingly apparent that growing Indian nationalism meant that British domination of the subcontinent was unsustainable. India was not alone either; a strong nationalistic desire for self-determination in colonial territories spread inexorably during the inter-war period.

Military developments were also instrumental in revealing the decline of the British Empire. World War I had been devastating for Great Britain as a world power. It had lost almost one million male youth in the conflict with perhaps another 1.5 million wounded. This same pool of men would have been, in better times, tapped to fill overseas military and administrative positions. Instead, many of them lay in the cold earth of rural France, unable to devote their lives for a second time to unrealistic imperialistic British ideals.

The situation for Britain’s vaunted royal navy was just as dire too. As the 1930s progressed, it became apparent that both Germany and Japan were likely to be foes rather than friends. But Britain’s imperial possessions were so numerous and scattered as to be utterly indefensible against these formidable opponents if they allied with each other.

In fact, the British navy’s secret plan for dealing with a simultaneous war against Germany and Japan was to immediately draw the German navy into a decisive defeat in the North Sea before sailing halfway around the world to protect its East Asian territories from Japanese aggression. This plan would have been laughable to any real military strategist, but still the British naval leadership believed it viable. Their national pride demanded it.

Needless to say, when war finally came all illusions of British strength were quickly shattered. The glittering British colony of Hong Kong surrendered to Japanese forces only 18 days after hostilities began. British Singapore – the Gibraltar of the East – fell after less than 10 weeks of fighting and with it the entire Malay Peninsula.

India was only saved because it was too far from Japan and too populous to be easily taken. Australia was forced to rely on the strength and magnanimity of the United State’s Pacific fleet for protection from the Japanese juggernaut.

And yet while it lasted, life in Britain’s colonies during the 1920s and 1930s reflected the dying embers of her imperial greatness. During these fleeting years Britain’s fading empire drifted gently through a hazy twilight that was equal parts arrogance and hedonism. British citizens walked through the streets of colonial Singapore or Hong Kong in the mid 1930s and imagined, foolishly, that the sun would never set on the British Empire. However, in only another couple decades the sun had indeed sunk below the horizon, never to rise on the Empire again.