By Sacha Peers - an independent writer and arts photographer Surrealism burst onto the British art scene on 11th June 1936, when the International Surrealist Exhibition opened at London's New Burlington Galleries.  Led by the poet David Gascoyne and artist Roland Penrose, the show introduced over 390 works of surrealist painting and sculpture to an unsuspecting London public. Even before opening, the exhibition was surrounded by controversy and myth with a consignment seized by customs officials on the grounds of indecency. However, it was the opening itself that became legendary. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas reportedly wandered among guests offering cups of boiled string, asking, “Do you like it weak or strong?”, while Salvador Dalí collaborated with Sheila Legge on a surrealist ‘happening’ in Trafalgar Square; Legge appearing as the ‘Phantom of Sex Appeal,’ dressed in white with her face obscured by paper flowers and ladybirds. Roland Penrose, Good Shooting, oil on canvas, 1939. Dalí’s own lecture was no less theatrical: he appeared dressed head to toe in a deep-sea diving suit, complete with diving-bell helmet that rendered his speech almost inaudible, holding two dogs on leads in one hand and a billiard cue in the other. As Dalí proceeded to give the lecture, it became apparent that he was slowly suffocating inside the diving bell, forcing an intervention by Gascoyne to prise the helmet off with the billiard cue. The general confusion was further compounded by his insistence on projecting slides upside down. Despite, or perhaps because of such spectacle, the exhibition drew more than 23,000 visitors in three weeks and stopped the British arts establishment in its tracks, raising a reappraisal of what art could be. Yet behind the theatrics lay serious intent. As organiser Herbert Read wrote, ‘Do not judge this movement kindly […] It is not just another amusing stunt. It is defiant—the desperate act of men too profoundly convinced of the rottenness of our civilisation to want to save a shred of its respectability.’ Artists, he argued, had until then only interpreted the world, ‘the point, however, is to transform it.’ And indeed, Surrealism left indelible marks on British culture. Its influence can be traced in the absurdist humour of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and beyond, where logic is gleefully upended and the everyday made strange. Ninety years on, almost to the day, Treasure House Fair will celebrate that seminal show with a landmark exhibition of Surrealist works drawn from the distinguished permanent collection of Southampton City Art Gallery. Paintings by Roland Penrose, a driving force behind the 1936 show, are joined by those of Paul Nash, whose deep attachment to the English landscape gave his Surrealism a distinctly British character. Alongside them are three trailblazing women artists whose contributions to the movement are only now receiving the recognition they deserve: Eileen Agar, Ithell Colquhoun, and Edith Rimmington. Agar being the only British woman included in the original 1936 exhibition. The display is completed by the Belgian-born Paul Delvaux, one of the most celebrated figures associated with the movement. As Treasure House returns to the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea for its fourth edition, we hope to recall the spirit of the original show. British Surrealism and Beyond: Treasures from Southampton City Art Gallery will be on display for the duration of Treasure House Fair, 25–30 June 2026, at the Royal Hospital Chelsea.

By Victoria Comstock-Kershaw - an arts writer, journalist, and critic. "The most ordinary things, the most common and familiar," wrote Montaigne, "if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles of nature." He was writing in the 1580s, before the Wunderkammer had a theory of itself, but he could have been writing its manifesto. The collecting impulse that swept through the courts and merchant houses of Renaissance Europe ran on a conviction that the Surrealists would pick up on and return to: that the right object, placed in the right proximity to the wrong other object, could make the familiar - as Surrealist André Betron would put it centuries later – “convulsively strange.” The earliest version of this juxtapositional style of collecting was the studiolo, a private room in a Renaissance palace where a collector arranged objects as a material self-portrait. Francesco I de' Medici filled his in Florence with instruments, minerals, and automata. This positioned him as sovereign of the world in miniature, both a representation of the collector's own wealth and intellect and a macrocosmic reflection of their society and universe. By the sixteenth century this had metastasised into the Wunderkammer (literally, room of wonders), which organised its holdings into two governing categories: naturalia, things produced by nature, and artificialia, things wrought by human hand. Ferrante Imperato, cataloguing his Neapolitan collection in 1599, described his objects as created by "the genius of man or the caprice of nature." A contemporary Wunderkammer — echoing the tradition of cabinets of curiosity, where the boundaries between science, art and collecting dissolve. The tension between those two forces was where the Wunderkammer lived. The most coveted objects were always those that sat uncomfortably in both categories at once, mirabilia, marvels that occupied the boundary between categories. The object that was simultaneously a natural specimen and a working artifact generated a specific kind of attention, one that later theorists of the Surrealist object would recognise immediately.  Francis Bacon, writing in 1605, dismissed the Wunderkammer as "frivolous impostures for pleasure and strangeness,” intending it as a condemnation. The Enlightenment duly obliged: by the eighteenth century the cabinet had been essentially rationalised out of existence, dispersing its contents throughout the disciplinary order of the modern museum and Linnean taxonomy. Naturalia went to natural history and artificialia went to decorative arts (the Enlightenment gallery at the British Museum can act as an illustration of this division); the productive confusion between them was resolved. The mirabilia had nowhere to go. André Breton, luckily, knew where to find them. Working in the early twentieth century, he re-animated European pre-Englightment instincts with his flea market wanderings. This led to his conceptualisation of the objet trouvé, as well as an insistence that beauty should be “convulsive” (arresting, disruptive of rational order) or not at all. The Surrealists were drawn to the Wunderkammer model precisely because it predated the disciplinary order of Locke, Linnaeus and Darwin: it offered a historical precedent for organising objects through analogy and psychological association instead of the scientific taxonomy that had characterised the previous century. When the International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London in June 1936 to over 23,000 visitors in three weeks, it staged itself according to the logic of the mirabilia by using categorical instability as the governing principle. That exhibition’s catalogue (designed by Max Ernst, priced at sixpence) is now being shown by Pater Harrington at this year's fair: the document of that moment, now itself a collectible object, has migrated over ninety years from printed matter into artifact. The categories, as ever, have shifted. The overlap between Surrealism and the Wunderkammer tradition is epistemological as much as aesthetic. Both refuse the museum's promise that objects can be fully explained by their categories (period, medium, provenance, function), and both locate meaning in the relational charge between things rather than in any single thing's intrinsic properties. For the contemporary collector, this has a practical implication: the most interesting acquisitions are often the ones that recontextualise everything around them and introduce a productive, convulsive friction into an established order. Treasure House Fair has, perhaps unsurprisingly, a few objects this June that make the case concretely. Niyoko Ikuta's Ku-187 (Free Essence-187), shown by A Lighthouse called Kanata, sits squarely in the nautilus tradition. The nautilus cup (a spiralling shell, sometimes carved with intricate scenes, usually mounted in silver or gold) was among the most coveted objects in any serious Kunstkammer, praised for its representation of natural mathematics, complemented by human craft. Ikuta collapses that distance entirely, coiling cut and laminated sheet glass into an unmistakably biological form and presenting glass as an organism in categorical suspension, both formally and conceptually. Ku-187 (Free Essence-187), Niyoko Ikuta, 2026. Cut, laminated sheet glass. Courtesy of A Lighthouse called Kanata. The fair places this alongside Frank Partridge's pair of Louis XV lacquer commodes, made for Madame de Pompadour around 1745. Chinoiserie itself is a form of category confusion, translating Chinese naturalia into French decorative artificialia. Pair of Louis XV lacquer commodes, circa 1745. Signed by Chevalier, owned by Madame de Pompadour and probably delivered to Versailles. Courtesy of Frank Partridge. The Wunderkammer was always an argument made through adjacency, and Treasure House generates those arguments across five centuries of making and collecting: Florian Kolhammer's Secessionist armchairs, for example, designed by Olbrich and upholstered in Koloman Moser fabric, belong to a tradition that consciously dissolved the hierarchy between fine and decorative art. This is the same dissolution the Surrealists would later locate in the flea market object, the found thing elevated by attention into something charged with psychological meaning. Pair of secessionist armchairs by Joseph Maria Olbrich (design) and Friedrich Otto Schmidt (execution), late 19th century. Solid oak, brass, fabric. Courtesy of Florian Kolhammer. The Surrealist tradition itself is also explicitly present at this year's fair, extending beyond the form of Peter Harrington’s first edition catalogue from the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition.  Rosior's diamond, sapphire, emerald and tsavorite garnet drop earrings in yellow gold enact the same categorical logic as the bezoar stone mounted in gold filigree that sat in every serious Kunstkammer: gemstones were among the most prized naturalia in the cabinet tradition, attributed with protective and sometimes magical properties. Their setting in precious metal, however, decisively placed them within the category of artificialia. The Surrealists understood this (as do contemporary jewelry designers, including Schiaparelli). Meret Oppenheim and Dalí made jewellery; Man Ray photographed it as erotic object; Calder hammered wire into ornaments he wore in his own pockets.  Diamond, sapphire, emerald and tsavorite garnet drop earrings, set in yellow gold. Courtesy of Rosior Jewels. Rose Uniacke's pair of Cubosfera wall lights, designed by Alessandro Mendini for Fidenza Vetraria around 1968, arrive from a moment in Italian radical design explicitly engaged with Surrealist object theory. The displacement of function, the familiar made strange by formal decision, is materially present here. Glass, technically an amorphous solid suspended between liquid and mineral, has always been the Wunderkammer's most philosophically interesting material. The Cubosfera pieces make that instability decorative, which is itself a Surrealist move. Pair of Cubosfera Wall Lights, circa 1968. Brass and glass wall lights, with heavy brass wall fixing. Courtesy of Rose Uniacke. Stone gallery's naturalia also harken to the Surrealist nature of the Wunderkammer tradition. A woolly rhinoceros foreleg, recovered from the North Sea and approximately forty thousand years old, is exactly the sort of large bone that Renaissance collections would attribute to giants, dragons - creatures outside of the taxonomic order that exceeded rational explanation. Alongside the rhinoceros leg, the gallery presents a fossil palm frond from Wyoming, fifty million years old and pressed into limestone as simultaneous geological specimen and image. In Dalí’s paintings in particular, bones recur as psychologically loaded objects, both as erotic symbols and momento mori, while the prehistoric geological formations of his native Cap de Creus appear as faces and half-formed creatures.  Front leg of a Woolly Rhinoceros, approx. 40 thousand years. Origin: North Sea, The Netherlands. Courtesy of Stone gallery. Southampton City Art Gallery's Surrealist collection arrives at Treasure House Fair this June - Roland Penrose, Eileen Agar, Ithell Colquhoun and others, some of their works unseen publicly for years - ninety years on from the exhibition that first brought them to a British public. The mirabilia of one century have become the artificialia of the next, which is precisely what Malebranche observed of the Wunderkammer in the seventeenth century: that within it, "the price depends solely on imagination, on passion and on chance." Collecting was never a single-discipline proposition: its power has always derived precisely from the range of its holdings and the productive friction generated between them. This very dynamic is consciously perpetuated by  Treasure House Fair.

Joanna Wu is a GIA Certified Gemologist with over 20 years of experience in the international coloured gemstone industry. Her expertise focuses on investment-grade gemstones, including Burmese rubies, Colombian emeralds and Kashmir sapphires, supported by extensive global sourcing and field research across some of the world’s most historic mining regions, including Myanmar and Sri Lanka. Alongside her gemstone expertise, Joanna has spent the past five years specialising in museum-quality antique jewellery and advisory, with a particular focus on historically significant European pieces. Her personal collection includes works by Castellani, Fabergé, Cartier and Tiffany & Co. Bridging gemological expertise, historical scholarship and contemporary aesthetics, Joanna brings a rare perspective shaped by both academic research and decades of market experience. 1. Your work sits at the intersection of gemology, history, and collecting — how do you assess a piece's value beyond its intrinsic material worth? Intrinsic material value is the starting point of a piece and the foundation of all assessment. Beyond material value and gem rarity, I evaluate a work by analysing its craftsmanship (such as goldsmithing techniques), the social context behind its stylistic expression, and whether it carries a verified provenance narrative. I examine the precision of its metalwork, decode the social conditions reflected in its aesthetic, and trace the integrity of its chain of provenance. Every exceptional piece is a window into the artistic and craft movements of its era — embodying the aesthetic sensibility and artisanal spirit of its time. Gemstones and precious metals are merely the physical vessel; it is the weight of history and the mastery of craft that provide the true soul of a piece. 2. Investment-grade gemstones are attracting increasing attention — where is the distinction between a truly exceptional stone and one that is merely commercially popular? The distinction comes down to three factors: Scarcity: Commercial stones are available at any time; investment-grade stones are singular — the deposits are exhausted, and no amount of money can bring them back. Untreated status: Commercial stones are commonly enhanced through human intervention (heat treatment, oiling); investment-grade stones demand no treatment — untreated status is the guarantee of value. Authority: Commercial stones need only look beautiful; investment-grade stones require not just high quality and scarcity, but top-tier laboratory certification (such as SSEF or Gübelin) conferring the highest grades — such as Pigeon's Blood for rubies, Royal Blue for sapphires. 3. In your view, how do antique jewellery and unmounted stones compare as long-term collecting or investment vehicles? Unmounted stones are a standardised asset — you are acquiring a scarce resource. The advantages are valuation transparency and strong liquidity; they are the cornerstone of an investment portfolio. Antique jewellery is an aesthetic artwork — you are acquiring history, craftsmanship, and legacy. The advantages are irreproducibility and vast potential for artistic premium; it suits collectors with a deep fluency in history and culture. 4. Your collection spans from Castellani to Fabergé — what draws you particularly to historically significant European works? What draws me is what I would call the thickness of time. Unparalleled craft: The granulation and filigree of Castellani, or the guilloché enamel and hardstone setting of Fabergé, represent skills now almost entirely lost — they mark a summit in the history of human artistry. Castellani revived the granulation and filigree of classical antiquity as an Archaeological Revival response to industrialisation; Fabergé brought guilloché enamel and hardstone setting to unrivalled refinement, underpinned by the ultimate aesthetic ambition of Imperial Russia. Narrative depth: Every piece once accompanied a soul of its era, carrying with it the sensibility of its aristocratic moment. To wear one is not merely to adorn — it is to enter into dialogue with an artist from a century past. Absolute singularity: Contemporary jewellery can be produced on demand, but each of these pieces bears the indelible imprint of its age and exists as a singular surviving object — one the industrial era can never recreate. To collect antique jewellery is to collect not merely jewellery, but the civilisational spirit of Europe at its height — sealed within gold, silver, and stone. Each piece is a miniature monument to an age that cannot be brought back. 5. In today's increasingly pluralistic aesthetic landscape, how do you balance historical integrity with contemporary taste when advising collectors? The core of that balance is: draw from history, judge by beauty. Respect the historical core: Never compromise the structure or essential character of a piece to accommodate contemporary decorative preferences — historical integrity is the soul of its asset value. Elevate contemporary resonance: Through considered styling and modern presentation, reveal the resonance that antiques carry for a contemporary audience — allowing objects of another age to speak with fresh aesthetic force. 6. Are we witnessing a shift in how younger collectors approach gemstones and antique jewellery? Clearly so. The core of the shift is a move from displaying wealth to narrating identity. The younger generation places far greater emphasis on sustainability and transparency. They demand transparency about a gem's mine of origin, the restoration history of antiques, and the ethics behind a brand. They are not simply purchasing an object — they are acquiring a history worth inheriting, one that aligns with their ethical convictions. For young collectors, gemstones and antiques are no longer simply instruments of wealth preservation — they have become a means of expressing personal taste and projecting a distinctive inner world. Luigi Pichler (1773–1854), Intaglio with a Victorious Youth as Hercules. Italian, Rome, circa 1810. Signed PICHLER in Greek in reverse on carnelian, set within an elaborate pendant mount, possibly by Castellani. 7. Having worked in frontline mining regions and deeply within the trading market, where do you see the greatest opportunities in gem collecting today? The core opportunity, in my view, lies in identifying undervalued origin premiums backed by top-tier laboratory certification, against the backdrop of depleting deposits and diverging asset classes. As well known traditional mining regions are exhausted, the market is moving away from name-driven buying toward a genuine reassessment of origin as a value in itself. The current opportunity sits in stones of the highest quality whose prices remain undervalued relative to their quality — simply because their origins have not yet been commercially amplified. Collectible fancy coloured sapphires — particularly padparadscha and star sapphires with direct mine-source provenance — fall into this category. The market's willingness to pay an origin premium has only just begun to emerge. A second opportunity I would highlight is emeralds. Though the secondary market appears stable, that stability conceals the reality of increasingly depleted high-quality sources. The circulation of top-grade untreated or minimally treated stones (no oil to minor oil, per laboratory grading) is declining, and their resilience and long-term value trajectory are well understood among serious collectors. This quiet solidity — overlooked by the mass market — represents precisely the most strategically astute moment to enter.