The world’s most beautiful private jewel collection – a first look

Kazumi Arikawa has spent the past 40 years zealously building what is widely considered to be the most important private collection of historic jewels in the world. Based in Tokyo, the antique jewellery dealer and creator of the Albion Art collection was inspired to curate such treasures after a “heart-shaking” moment in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum 40 years ago, where he first saw jewels as works of art, and has now assembled 500 masterpieces spanning earliest antiquity to the mid-20th century, from across cultures and civilisations.

Either something sets my heart trembling or it does not

While some of the jewels have been showcased in museum exhibitions, the collection is being revealed publicly for the first time next month in a book, Divine Jewels: The Pursuit of Beauty, a project five years in the making. It documents 250 jewels from Albion Art’s core collection, along with masterpieces that have passed through Arikawa’s hands into private ownership, including spectacular tiaras now in the Qatar Museums collection. Tiaras are one of Arikawa’s particular passions, along with engraved gems and cameos – which he considers miniature sculptures. “The most valuable item in the 15th-century Medici collection was not a painting or sculpture but a cameo,” he says.

Arikawa, now 72, had been working with his sister in his mother’s commercial jewellery business in Japan. As a practising Buddhist, he always appreciated how his religion’s deities were adorned with jewels, and how mineral crystals represented the sacred geometry and order of the natural world; ideas that fuelled his very particular philosophy about jewellery and gems. 

Following his epiphany at the V&A in 1982, he sought out antique jewellery dealers in Tokyo, who trusted him with jewels on consignment, which he sold within weeks. This success prompted him to return to London – the centre of the antique jewellery world at the time – on a buying trip where he met jewellery historian Diana Scarisbrick, who introduced him to the city’s top dealers (and worked with him on his book for 20 years). Driven by his mission to showcase the art of the jewel, he continued to buy and sell, building Albion Art.

While Arikawa has been indefatigable in his quest, he believes that jewels actually find their way to him. Among them: one of the finest pairs of Hellenistic gold earrings in existence, renaissance figural pendants, Catherine the Great’s emeralds, Queen Victoria’s coronation diamond chandelier earrings, archaeological-revival masterworks by Castellani of Rome, art nouveau jewels by René Lalique, belle époque diamonds by Cartier, a 1920s Egyptian revival bracelet by Lacloche Frères and a 1950s-era Van Cleef & Arpels ballerina brooch. All, he says, are expressions of “concentrated beauty”.

Looking back, Arikawa explains that he “wanted to create a real jewellery culture in Japan” – he says the market was “ordinary” when he started. How has he trained his eye and honed his taste for – and knowledge of – European jewellery? He buys purely on instinct, he replies. “It’s very easy to fall in love; we don’t need knowledge. Either something sets my heart trembling, or it does not.”

He shares these ideas with the visitors he welcomes into his Tokyo salon, with its cathedral-like stone walls and soundtrack of Gregorian chants. He begins with a traditional Japanese tea ceremony before presenting his selection of treasures, guiding visitors through their stories, explaining how the jewels move him, and how the miraculous gemstones represent “the crystallisation of the human spirit”. It’s a full-circle moment that fulfils Arikawa’s lifelong mission – to show and share the relentless pursuit of beauty. 

Divine Jewels: The Pursuit of Beauty by Kazumi Arikawa and Diana Scarisbrick is published on 3 October by Flammarion