21 - AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN FAIENCE NECKLACE

AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN FAIENCE NECKLACE Restrung with turquoise, blue-green and red faience and glass beads with metal spacers and gold and silver beads and drops, centred with a green-glazed wedjat (Eye of Horus) amulet. Tests as approximately 50% gold (beads), 54% silver (drops) With bolt ring clasp. Accompanied by a Spink & Son Ltd box of the 1920s-1930s, the interior stamped 'BY APPOINTMENT SPINK & SON LTD 6, KING STREET, ST JAMES'. Gross weight: 12.82g The necklace is in good archaeological condition, with typical handling wear, surface erosion and minor pitting consistent with long-term burial. The clasp is in perfect working order, and the piece is offered in good condition. Provenance Private collection, United States, probably acquired in London in 1961-1962 Thence by descent to the present owner The fitted case bears the address 6 King Street, St James’s, used by Spink & Son for its antiquities galleries in the early and mid-twentieth century. By then the firm, best known for coins and medals, had become one of London’s established dealers in antiquities, with its own specialist, Alfred E. Knight, whose guide to Egyptian amulets, Amentet, was written explicitly for collectors. Spink’s Egyptian stock was greatly enlarged in the early 1920s, when the firm bought the celebrated collection of the Reverend William MacGregor, comprising many thousands of objects, and sold it at Sotheby’s in 1922. Spink also published 'Egyptian antiquities from the MacGregor, Hilton Price, Amherst, Meux and Carnarvon collections'. The firm’s own records were lost in the Blitz, so individual sales from this period can rarely be traced. This necklace, retaining its Spink case and label is a rare survival of this period of the London antiquities trade.