78 - AN EARLY 20TH CENTURY STICK PIN, WITH MONOGRAM OF ARCHDUKE OTTO OF AUSTRIA

AN EARLY 20TH CENTURY STICK PIN, WITH MONOGRAM OF ARCHDUKE OTTO OF AUSTRIA VIENNA The head designed as the crowned monogram 'O' of Archduke Otto Franz Joseph of Austria (1865-1906), set with rose-cut diamonds, beneath an archducal crown set throughout with small rose-cut diamonds. In silver-topped gold Vienna mark and dog's head mark for 14ct gold Accompanied by a black box with black velvet and red silk interior, not necessarily original to the pin. Size/dimensions: 8.30cm long Gross weight: 3.51g All diamonds are present and secure. The gold is in excellent condition with an appealing dark patina to the head, and the marks are sharp. The shaft is intact and relatively straight. The pin is offered in excellent condition. Archduke Otto, known in Vienna as “der schöne Otto” (“the handsome Otto”), was the younger brother of Franz Ferdinand and father of the future Emperor Karl I, whose wife Zita’s cypher appears on the following lot. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the First World War, the stick pin was an essential accessory for any well-dressed man, worn to secure and ornament the folds of a cravat or tie. It was also one of the most personal gifts a sovereign or royal household could bestow. Pins set with a crowned cypher or monogram were given as tokens of favour and remembrance to courtiers, officials, household staff, visiting dignitaries, and the guests and companions of royal shooting parties, regattas and state visits. Small enough to be given freely, yet unmistakably royal, they carried their recipient's connection to the court wherever they were worn. Reading these jewels is part of their appeal. The initials are often intertwined or mirrored so that they read in either direction, sometimes with a regnal numeral, and the form of the crown above signals rank: imperial and royal crowns, the archducal crown of the Habsburgs, and the strawberry-leaved coronet of a duke. Many pins survive in the cases of the court jewellers who supplied them, and the cases in this section form a small directory of royal patronage, from Sy & Wagner, Court Goldsmiths in Berlin, and V. Mayer's Söhne, Imperial and Royal Court Jewellers in Vienna, to E. & R. Altenloh, purveyors to the King and Queen of the Belgians, and Benzie of Cowes, the yachtsmen's jeweller. The families represented here, among them Hanover, Denmark, Belgium, Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia and Habsburg Austria, were closely bound together by marriage, and pins such as these passed freely between their courts. Within a few years, many of these monarchies had gone. The war that began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 ended in 1918 with the fall of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, and the crowned cyphers on these small gold jewels belong to a world that vanished almost overnight.