Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 20. (Budapest, 2001)

Ildikó PANDUR - John WADE: A Unique Piece of Jewellery in the Collection of the Budapest Museum of Applied Arts: A Souvenir from the Colony of Victoria, Australia

of the exhibits went under the hammer at an auction held at Clarence House, the residence of the Duke of Edinburgh, around 1893-1894. However, it was not the present to the Prince that began the sequence of rings decorated with compartments containing natural gold nuggets. The Melbourne daily The Argus carried a report in 1855 of jeweller Louis Mier (Meyer? Meier?) making some peculiar, inventive pieces; "a ring of pure colonial gold, is so contrived as to show, in separate compartments, small specimens from the different gold-fields in its native nuggetty form."

28 And yet it seems a likely hypothesis that the princely present gave a boost to the fashion of this type of ring spreading in wider circles. The Budapest ring, whose missing ornament originally set in the shield might well have been the British Royal Standard, is of particularly fine and meticulous execution. Its unique type, together with the uncommon execution, support the supposition that the piece might have been one of the gifts received by the Prince and that it later arrived in Hungary via purchase from the Royal traveller. To answer the question of just how, with whose assistance, this occurred, will probably take a lucky strike similar to the good fortune that gold diggers prayed for.