Darwins Whale Tooth ........Scrimshaw with Provenance

Scott Reyburn of Bloomberg is reporting a scrimshaw whale tooth owned by Charles Darwin sold for $67,340.00. Why is this single item important for appraisers?  Because this is a good item to review and analyze when determining how provenance impacts the value of personal property. Compare this to similar age and quality scrimshaw whales teeth without provenance and look at the percentage increase as a factor for determining vale and how provenance impacts value for a parallel item.A good value to keep track of as an appraiser.

Reyburn reports

The 7-inch-long tooth was decorated by James Bute, a private in the Royal Marines, who was on H.M.S. Beagle with Darwin when the ship surveyed the Galapagos Islands in 1835.

Both sides of the decorated ivory -- known as a “scrimshaw” -- are engraved with signed depictions of the three-masted sloop, said London-based auction house Bonhams, which expected the piece to sell for as much as 50,000 pounds. The buyer was bidding on the telephone and the price was a record for a scrimshaw sold in the U.K., said Bonhams.

“This is without doubt the most important British scrimshaw to come on the market in my 30-year career,” Jon Baddeley, head of Bonhams’s collectors’ items, said in an e- mailed statement. This year is the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of “The Origin of Species.”

H.M.S. Beagle left England June 1831 on a surveying expedition that lasted five years. Darwin’s account of the voyage was published in 1839, 20 years before “The Origin of Species.”

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