Gallery Three

Gallery pages are for information and pictures of special and one of a kind antique rosaries. None of these are for sale. Please see the left side bar for NUMEROUS pages of rosaries for sale! Thanks so much and enjoy.

Some of the most rare and expensive late 1800's and early 1900's rosaries are those made with saphiret beads. I own only one and it is an incomplete antique rosary from France. There is a mystic to saphiret, no longer made, the exact process has been lost or may just be too expensive to produce. Actual gold was used in the making of these subtle beads. Produced in Gablonz, a famous glass bead making city in Bohemia (Czechosovakia), gold was added to a sapphire blue glass which produced the mysterious effect of the beads changing color in different lighting. The beads are extremely hard to photograph but I have added a couple of pictures to help you visual these gorgeous and rare beads. In most light, they appear a rather brick pinkish red but when held to sunlight deep within the bead there is a sapphire blue. Sometime during the mid 1900's there was an attempt to revive the production of saphiret but the quality is simply not the same. I have one rosary from the 1920's that is a very pale version of saphiret. The beads appear light pink in normal light but flash the same blue in the sunlight. I actually would never have realized these were saphiret if it hadn't been a sunny day! All the other saphiret rosaries I have had over the years have been the deeper brick rose color.

This is a sweet old horn souvenir rosary from Ireland. The use of horn was apparently banned in Ireland in the early 1970's putting an end to these rosaries (I read this but cannot find the reference now so I may be incorrect).These were very popular from the early 1900's through the mid 1900's and were souvenir rosaries primarily. I have seen some outstanding older ones with silver Christ figures and elaborate bead caps. I have also seen some very cheaply made ones from the end era of production. This one is quite unusual in that it has a harp for a center- I've never had another like it! 20" long when laid flat. The cross has the natural curve of the horn, the corpus is probably celluloid. I am not sure if the center is horn, cross and all beads certainly are. Many times you see these sold as plastic, celluloid (an early pre-plastic) or a variety of other descriptions, all inaccurate. Horn can be shaped, if you have seen an early horn spoon you can see how it was shaped into the spoon form. It can also be cut and carved. I have also heard that perhaps hooves were used for these rosaries but I can't confirm that.