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Two Centuries of Engagement Rings with Antique Jewellery
A ring made a century ago can still disclose a surprising amount about itself. Its metal, the cut of a stone, the construction of a setting, a hallmark, an engraving or a later repair may locate it within a period and reveal how it was made. What usually disappears first is the private information. The name of the person who wore it, the occasion on which it was given and the route by which it eventually reached another owner are much harder to recover.
For twenty years, Oliver Rheinfrank and Dirk Holzfuss have worked at this point between what remains knowable and what has been lost. Rheinfrank Antique Jewellery specialises in antique and vintage jewellery from the early eighteenth to the late twentieth century, with showrooms in Berlin and Munich and an extensive online shop. The collection spans Georgian, Victorian, Historicist, Art Nouveau, Edwardian and Art Deco pieces alongside later twentieth-century jewellery, including rings, bracelets, brooches, lockets, earrings, men’s jewellery and engagement rings.
When Rheinfrank and Holzfuss began building the company, antique jewellery was still perceived, Rheinfrank recalls, as old-fashioned and commercially uncertain. He was working as a stylist and studying art when his first buying trip took him to Stockholm. Looking closely at the workmanship of the rings, brooches and necklaces he encountered there changed his understanding of the field. London, Barcelona and Paris followed, then buying trips across Europe.
Those early journeys developed into a network of more than 40 international dealers, with contacts extending from Italy to the United States. For a period, Rheinfrank moved to London to coordinate acquisitions and work more closely with international dealers, while Holzfuss spent time in Milan maintaining relationships with customers and contacts in Italy.
Such networks are fundamental to a trade built around objects that have already changed hands. Estates are divided, family ownership ends, collections are sold and dealers exchange pieces across borders. Jewellery can disappear into private possession for decades before resurfacing somewhere else. Cultural anthropologist Igor Kopytoff described objects as capable of passing through different social identities over time, changing their status as they are bought, gifted, inherited, stored and sold again. With jewellery, those shifts are particularly tangible because ownership and personal use repeatedly alter the meaning of the same physical object.
At Rheinfrank & Holzfuss, finding these pieces and deciding which ones enter the collection remains largely Oliver Rheinfrank’s responsibility, while Dirk Holzfuss concentrates more closely on sales. Their account of the past two decades suggests that this division has been productive precisely because the two roles encourage different judgements. Rheinfrank has a weakness for elaborate individual pieces whose commercial prospects may not be immediately obvious, while Holzfuss keeps the wider business around those decisions in view. That tension helps explain why unusual single pieces coexist with categories that appeal to a broader clientele.
The business itself has grown from a twelve-square-metre sales space to a Berlin showroom of 165 square metres with more than 60 vitrines. A second showroom opened in Munich’s Glockenbachviertel in 2025, giving the company another physical setting for a collection that had already developed an international audience online.
Before a piece is offered for sale, its material authenticity is examined and the available information about it is documented. Each purchase is accompanied by a Rheinfrank certificate recording materials, age, origin where known, dimensions and weight. If an independent gemmological report already exists, this is identified with the piece.
There is also a clear limit to how far that examination should go. Rheinfrank & Holzfuss does not routinely remove mounted gemstones simply to obtain more precise laboratory grading, since doing so would require dismantling historical work. Some information can be established through hallmarks, construction, gemstone cuts and workmanship; other details cannot be recovered without compromising the object or pretending that the available evidence says more than it does.
That does not leave an antique jewel without history. Jewellery has carried unusually personal information for centuries. Rings have marked courtship, marriage, remembrance and mourning, while lockets and portrait miniatures kept images and traces of absent people close to the body. Engravings can preserve initials or dates, repairs show later intervention, and wear records continued use even when the circumstances behind it have disappeared. None of these traces produces a complete biography, but together they make an earlier life materially present.
This is not an archive in the institutional sense; the pieces are selected with the expectation that they will leave again, which means historical character has to coexist with practical wearability. Rheinfrank & Holzfuss works with a network of three master goldsmiths alongside specialists in antique jewellery and gemstones. Ring sizes can be altered, clasps repaired and damaged elements restored where necessary, with the existing construction determining how far an intervention should go. Jewellery is checked for safe wearability before sale, and purchased rings can generally be resized within 24 hours.
Engagement rings have become one of the clearest specialisms within the wider collection. Rheinfrank & Holzfuss describes its selection of antique and vintage engagement rings as the largest in Germany. Diamond solitaires appear alongside rings set with sapphires, rubies, emeralds and other coloured stones, with examples extending across more than two centuries of jewellery making. Engagement rings make the particular appeal of an older object especially clear. A new owner does not need to invent a previous romance for an antique ring to feel different from something newly manufactured. Its earlier circumstances may be unknown, yet the object has already existed within another time, survived changes in taste and ownership and reached a moment for which its maker could never have planned.
The audience for such pieces has changed considerably since Rheinfrank and Holzfuss began. Rheinfrank describes today’s customers as often around thirty, international and far removed from the much older clientele once associated with antique jewellery. Victorian diamond bangles can now appear beside Edwardian ruby work, Art Deco sapphire and aquamarine rings, engraved gold wedding bands, signet rings, cufflinks, lockets and later vintage solitaires. Seen together, these pieces make clear how little the broad label of vintage explains about their differences in metalwork, stone cutting, ornament and proportion. Much of the range can be explored online, while the two showrooms remain places where those distinctions become immediate. Rheinfrank Antique Jewellery can be visited at Linienstraße 44 in Berlin Mitte and Klenzestraße 41 in Munich, with both locations open to visitors with or without an appointment.
What distinguishes antique jewellery in the end is not that every missing detail can be recovered. Much of it cannot. Its attraction lies in the coexistence of material precision and historical openness. Rheinfrank & Holzfuss can establish periods, materials, construction and condition, restore what needs attention and trace certain aspects of an object’s past, while other parts remain inaccessible. That incompleteness becomes tangible when someone stands in front of a ring, brooch or bracelet whose earlier life is only partly legible and decides that its next one should be theirs.
— Explore more at
www.antique-jewellery.de
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Images Antique Jewellery, generated with AI