NEW YORK, NY.- This June, Sotheby’s will present A Marvelous Journey: The Collection of Maurice Tempelsman, a single-owner sale bringing together fine art, gold boxes and objects of vertu, antiquities, and works of deep personal significance assembled over a lifetime of exceptional range and curiosity.

Taking place on 24 June at Sotheby’s New York, the sale offers a portrait of Maurice Tempelsman, 1929–2025: the Antwerp-born entrepreneur, philanthropist, civic leader, and devoted collector who, over the course of a remarkable life, moved between the corridors of international power, the newly independent nations of postcolonial Africa, and the most intimate circles of American cultural and intellectual life.

He was Chairman of the Africa-America Institute and Corporate Council on Africa and the International Advisory Council of the Harvard AIDS Institute; a Director of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, NDI; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; and was for more than a decade the beloved companion of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Self-taught, a man of multilingual sophistication, enduring curiosity, and genuine scholarly appetite, Tempelsman served as well on the board of the Academy of American Poets and as trustee of the Institute of Fine Arts.

Highlights of the sale include a Very Rare Gold and Hardstone Steinkabinett by Christian Gottlieb Stiehl, Dresden, circa 1770, estimate $600,000–800,000, unseen by the public for more than sixty years, alongside personal objects that were given to him by Mrs. Onassis, among them a Greek alabaster head bequeathed to Tempelsman in her will and an inscribed Cartier Tank wristwatch.

Maurice Tempelsman was born in 1929 into a Jewish trading family in Antwerp, one of the great port cities of Northern Europe, and from his earliest years he absorbed both the commercial rhythms of international trade and a deep fascination with the wider world.

Growing up in a city shaped by its harbor, he also developed a lifelong love of the sea and a particular appreciation for maritime objects. In 1940, as Nazi Germany invaded Belgium, the Tempelsman family fled, spending nearly two years moving through France, Spain and Portugal before boarding the steamship Serpa Pinto in Lisbon. They then spent seven months at Camp Gibraltar, on the island of Jamaica, before finally being admitted to the United States.

Tempelsman eventually settled in New York City and, at sixteen, launched a diamond business with his father.

Over the following decades, Tempelsman traveled extensively across the African continent, Russia, Latin America and Europe, forging relationships with heads of state and liberation leaders alike, and becoming chief executive of Lazare Kaplan International, the largest diamond company in the United States.

Alongside his business pursuits, he gave generously to a wide range of philanthropic causes, serving on the boards of the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, among others. He was a steadfast supporter of Nelson Mandela and helped organize Mandela’s inaugural visit to the United States following his release from prison.

In the final chapter of his public life, Tempelsman was known above all as the companion of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The two had first met in the late 1950s, when she was the wife of Senator John F. Kennedy, and their friendship deepened into a close and devoted partnership following the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, in 1975.

They shared a love of art and antiques, music, literature, and the French language, entertaining quietly at her Fifth Avenue apartment and holidaying in Martha’s Vineyard. Tempelsman was at her side when she died in May 1994, and read C.P. Cavafy’s poem Ithaka — among her most beloved — at her funeral, adding his own quiet coda: “And now the journey is over, too short, alas, too short.”

He died on 23 August 2025, three days before his ninety-sixth birthday, and is survived by three children, a daughter-in-law, six grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren.

The collection offered in A Marvelous Journey reflects the full arc of that life. Drawing on interests that ranged from 18th-century Saxon goldsmithing to 19th-century American painting, from late Ptolemaic Egyptian jewelry to the intimate personal objects shared with one of the most celebrated women of the twentieth century, the sale presents a collector whose eye was formed not by a single discipline but by decades of travel, scholarship, and genuine aesthetic pleasure.

Taken together, the works paint a picture of a man who, in the words of Cavafy’s poem that gave the sale its title, was always enriched by the journey itself.

“Maurice Tempelsman was a collector of extraordinary breadth and genuine intellectual seriousness. What strikes you, looking at this collection as a whole, is how naturally it coheres — not around a single period or category, but around a sensibility. Every object in this collection reflects a man who looked carefully, collected with real conviction, and lived with beautiful things in a way that enriched everyone around him. It is a privilege to bring his collection to market, and to share the story of his remarkable life with collectors around the world.” — Dennis Harrington, Sotheby’s Head of European Furniture

A glimpse inside the collection

A very rare and important gold and hardstone “Steinkabinett” box
Christian Gottlieb Stiehl, Dresden, circa 1770
Estimate: $600,000–800,000

Among the most singular objects in the sale is a gold-mounted Steinkabinett box of extraordinary rarity, made around 1770 by Christian Gottlieb Stiehl, court lapidary in Dresden and one of the most technically accomplished goldsmiths of the Enlightenment period.

Stiehl produced only ten such boxes across a career spanning more than five decades, of which four are held in permanent museum collections — at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, and the Musée du Louvre — making any appearance on the open market a genuinely exceptional event.

The Tempelsman example last appeared at auction in Paris in 1906. It was documented once more in 1935 in the standard reference literature, known only through a single black-and-white illustration, its dimensions unrecorded and its astonishing range of color entirely undocumented. It entered the Tempelsman collection in the 1960s and has not been seen publicly since.

The box is a consummate expression of the Enlightenment’s union of scientific inquiry and luxury craftsmanship. Its surfaces are inlaid in Zellenmosaik, a technique of extreme precision in which finely polished hardstone specimens — agates, carnelians, sardonyx, white opal which had fascinated the Electors of Saxony for decades, and petrified wood, most quarried in the Ore Mountains of Saxony — are set à jour within gold cloisonné borders less than a millimeter wide, achieving both a near-seamless polished surface and, when held to light, the luminous effect of stained glass.

The lid is centered with an ingeniously inlaid floral spray of roses, carnations, and forget-me-nots executed in lapis lazuli, a flower that carries rich associations in the Saxon court tradition, historically given on occasions where loyalty and faithfulness were to be honored.

Tiny engraved numbers above each hardstone panel correspond to a handwritten bilingual booklet, written in both French, the official court language, and German Kurrent script, concealed within a secret sliding compartment in the base, activated by pressing one of the opal inlays.

The booklet catalogues every stone on the box and its specific place of origin: part inventory, part cabinet of curiosities, and entirely characteristic of an era when the desire to understand the natural world and the desire to beautify it were one and the same impulse, combined with a level of technical mastery that remains unparalleled today.

“I have seen a great many gold boxes in my career, but when I first encountered this one, I could hardly believe my eyes. I had known it only from a black-and-white image in the reference literature — a single illustration from nearly a century ago — with no record of its colors, the delicacy of the carefully chosen hardstones or just how magnificent it is in person. To have a Stiehl Steinkabinett of this quality and condition reappear in public after nearly a century is a true discovery. It is not only an object of breathtaking beauty, but a masterpiece rooted in history and science that transcends the boundaries of any single collecting category.” — Alexandra Starp, Head of Vertu and Gold Boxes

“My Greek alabaster head”: A White House treasure bequeathed by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the taste of the antique
Estimate: $7,000–10,000

Few objects in the sale carry as concentrated a provenance as this alabaster head of a woman, which occupied a place of particular significance in the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and ultimately, in that of Maurice Tempelsman.

The head is documented on the mantelpiece of the Yellow Oval Room of the White House in an August 1963 photograph, and its importance to Mrs. Kennedy is confirmed by a memo she sent to White House Chief Usher J.B. West requesting that a spotlight be installed above the mantel specifically to illuminate it: “It would be nice to do this soon as the Pres. would like it.”

The head later appeared in a 1973 Vogue feature on Mrs. Kennedy’s apartment at 1040 Park Avenue, where it was prominently featured in her study.

In her will, she bequeathed it to Tempelsman by name: “I give and bequeath to my friend Maurice Tempelsman, if he survives me, my Greek Alabaster head of a woman if owned by me at the time of my death.”

The head’s provenance places it at the center of one of the most storied domestic interiors of the twentieth century.

View of the Yellow Oval Room. White House, Washington, D.C., Robert Knudsen. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

Cartier Tank wristwatch with engraved caseback gold mechanical Tank on strap
Estimate: $10,000–15,000

Among the most intimate objects in the sale is a gold Cartier Tank wristwatch given by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to Maurice Tempelsman on his birthday.

The caseback is engraved in Mrs. Kennedy’s hand: For Maurice Love J 8/26/1985.

A classic Louis Cartier model with deployant buckle, the watch is offered in its original Cartier presentation box and is fresh to the market.

Egyptian gold snake armlet
Roman Period, circa 1st century B.C.–1st century A.D.
Estimate: $20,000–30,000

This substantial gold armlet, fashioned in the form of a coiled serpent, is a refined example of a type worn high on the upper arm in late Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, when Egyptian iconography was reinterpreted through the lens of Hellenistic and Roman aesthetics.

The serpent carried layered symbolic resonance in both traditions: a sign of protection, regeneration, and divine authority in Egyptian belief, and an emblem of eternity and chthonic power in the Greco-Roman world.

The armlet was designed to be worn on the left arm, with the larger serpent head facing inward toward the body. Comparable pieces are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre, with an isolated example in the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Robert Frederick Blum
Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, 1881–85
Estimate: $300,000–500,000

Painted during Blum’s years of extensive engagement with Venice — he visited the city on six occasions during the 1880s and regarded it as among the defining subjects of his career — this luminous oil captures the radiant, color-saturated quality that distinguishes his Venetian work and reflects the particular influence of James Abbott McNeill Whistler on his painterly approach.

Venice was Blum’s most commercially successful subject, and the top two prices for the artist at auction have both been achieved through Venetian paintings. The work was previously owned by Edwin Lefevre, a New York-based writer and authority on collecting who lived near Blum in Greenwich Village and owned several works by the artist.

It last appeared at public auction more than a century ago, when The Walpole Galleries offered it in their January 1917 evening sale, and has been in the present collection for more than two decades.

Montague Dawson
Ship in a Storm
Estimate: $80,000–120,000

Montague Dawson was the preeminent marine painter of the twentieth century, and large-scale works of this character, combining dramatic narrative tension with masterful handling of light and weather, represent the category at its most sought-after.

The work has been in the Tempelsman collection since 1960.