Sotheby’s will present A Marvelous Journey: The Collection of Maurice Tempelsman at its New York galleries on 24 June 2026, 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. The sale offers a portrait of Maurice Tempelsman (1929 to 2025), the Antwerp-born entrepreneur, philanthropist and civic leader who moved between the corridors of international power, the newly independent nations of postcolonial Africa, and the most intimate circles of American cultural life, and who for more than a decade was the companion of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Born in 1929 into a Jewish trading family in Antwerp, Tempelsman fled with his family as Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in 1940, spending nearly two years moving through France, Spain and Portugal before boarding the steamship Serpa Pinto in Lisbon, then seven months at Camp Gibraltar on the island of Jamaica before being admitted to the United States. He settled in New York City and, at sixteen, launched a diamond business with his father.
Over the following decades he travelled extensively across the African continent, Russia, Latin America and Europe, forging relationships with heads of state and liberation leaders, and becoming chief executive of Lazare Kaplan International, the largest diamond company in the United States. He served on the boards of the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, among others, was a steadfast supporter of Nelson Mandela, and helped organise Mandela’s inaugural visit to the United States following his release from prison.
Tempelsman first met Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the late 1950s, when she was the wife of Senator John F. Kennedy, and their friendship deepened into a 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. Tempelsman was at her side when she died in May 1994, and read C.P. Cavafy’s poem Ithaka at her funeral. 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.
Among the most singular objects in the sale is a very rare gold and hardstone Steinkabinett box by Christian Gottlieb Stiehl, Dresden, circa 1770 (est. $600,000 to $800,000), unseen by the public for more than sixty years. Stiehl, court lapidary in Dresden, 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. The Tempelsman example last appeared at auction in Paris in 1906, entered the collection in the 1960s, and has not been seen publicly since. Its surfaces are inlaid in Zellenmosaik, with finely polished agates, carnelians, sardonyx, white opal and petrified wood set within gold cloisonné borders less than a millimeter wide, and a handwritten bilingual booklet cataloguing every stone is concealed within a secret sliding compartment in the base.
Several lots carry a direct connection to Mrs. Onassis. A Greek alabaster head of a woman (est. $7,000 to $10,000), documented on the mantelpiece of the Yellow Oval Room of the White House in an August 1963 photograph, was bequeathed to Tempelsman by name in her will. A gold Cartier Tank wristwatch (est. $10,000 to $15,000), given to him on his birthday, is engraved in her hand, For Maurice Love J 8/26/1985, and is offered in its original Cartier presentation box.
Further highlights span the full arc of Tempelsman’s interests. An Egyptian gold snake armlet from the Roman Period, circa 1st century B.C. to 1st century A.D. (est. $20,000 to $30,000), takes the form of a coiled serpent worn high on the upper arm in late Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. Robert Frederick Blum’s Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, 1881 to 85 (est. $300,000 to $500,000), last appeared at public auction more than a century ago, when The Walpole Galleries offered it in January 1917. Montague Dawson’s Ship in a Storm (est. $80,000 to $120,000) has been in the Tempelsman collection since 1960.
(Press Release)
