A Spectacular Ring Once Owned by “Austria’s Mona Lisa” Comes to Auction

All antique jewels have stories—sometimes deeply rooted in family lore, sometimes hinted at with a mysterious inscription, sometimes infuriatingly silent, waiting for our imaginations to fill in the details of their glittering history.

And sometimes, the saga is spectacular—as spectacular as the jewel itself. Tomorrow, one such piece will come up for sale at Sotheby’s in London, at a special auction curated in collaboration with Dover Street Market: a diamond toi et moi ring, with a circular-cut tinted-brown diamond and a near-colorless diamond weighing 2.19 and 1.85 carats, with an estimate of £5,000–7,000.

The ring once belonged to the husband of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the subject of Gustav Klimt’s famous painting Woman in Gold, and though we cannot be 100 percent certain, it is fairly safe to assume that it once adorned her tapered fingers. (The painting itself was chronicled in the 2015 Helen Mirren film, Woman in Gold. Stolen from the Bloch-Bauer family by the Nazis, it was finally restored to its rightful heirs, after decades of litigation, in 2005.)

Did Adele Bloch-Bauer have an affair with Klimt? Was she his mistress as well as his muse? More than a century later, scholarly opinion remains divided. What we do know for certain is this: Bloch-Bauer was a famous patron of the arts in fin de siècle Vienna, a hotbed of avant-garde music, architecture, philosophy, and literature. She was tall and thin, modern and gorgeous—she smoked!—and she ran weekly salons in her beautiful home, where artists, writers, composers, actors, and socialist firebrands came to call.

“Austria’s Mona Lisa,” as she was nicknamed, married Ferdinand Bloch in 1899. (He was older than she and very rich.) She died at 43 in 1925, and her husband gave the ring to his great-niece, Helen Marie Stutzova. It was then passed on to Stutzova’s daughter, Charlotte Mayer, who escaped the Nazis and found exile in London with her mother in 1939. (Mayer went on to become a renowned sculptor.)

Oh, but if this ring could talk, the stories it could tell! Tales of sacher tortes and salons in Vienna, tales of fleeing the Nazis and finding a home in London. And tales, yet to be written, of a new owner, who will stare into its fiery depths at the dawn of the second decade of the twenty-first century.