Three Hundred Pieces From a Dealer's Vault Head to Sotheby's

Sotheby's is selling the contents of the A La Vieille Russie vault in a single sale of more than three hundred pieces, with the Russian maker collectors chase hardest set in the leading role. Three of the lots are botanical studies, flowers worked in precious materials that surface so seldom that their appearance alone is the story. Another is a sedan chair in miniature, finished in pink enamel laid over an engine-turned ground, the kind of object made to be turned in the hand rather than set on a shelf. A vault, by definition, holds what a dealer did not put in the window, and a sale on this scale lets a buyer see a whole category at once rather than one box or frame at a time. For the collector who has built a cabinet slowly over years, from Palm Beach to Aspen, that is the rare occasion worth clearing a calendar for. Sotheby's has not published estimates in the material released so far.

With reporting from Galerie.