The Prins & Prins Museum of Gems & Jewellery is a private collection, curated over fifty seven years by Dr Petré Prins. It traces forty thousand years of southern African craftsmanship, the geology that built our gem economy, and three centuries of European jewellery. Every piece is studied, catalogued and on quiet permanent display.
Most of Cape Town walks past Huguenot House every day. Almost no one knows of the museum in its cellar.
Book a Tour or Private Viewing →Each cabinet a Period. The zeitgeist of each Period is reflected by its jewellery.
1714 ◆ 1830
Old-cut diamonds set in silver over gold, foiled stones for candlelit colour, and the first pavé seed pearls. Georgian jewellers worked slowly, every piece unique.
1830 ◆ 1901
An empire's worth of taste expressed in 18ct gold filigree, marcasite night-wear, painted porcelain miniatures and the language of mourning. Queen Victoria wore black for forty years and the jewellers obliged.
1880 ◆ 1911
The first era of platinum settings, milgrain edges and Belle Époque lightness. Court jewellers reached their technical peak just as the world rolled toward war. A short decade, a perfect one.
1920 ◆ 1939
Hard angles, lacquer-black onyx, calibré-cut sapphire and ruby, baguette diamonds and the first taste of modernist design at the bench. The first time jewellery looked like architecture.
The collection opens where the human hand first shaped a tool. Forty thousand years before the Georgian jeweller, southern African ancestors were carving, beading and casting.
3.4 million BC ◆ 1,000 BC
In the Western Cape, stone tools have been recovered that date from 300,000 to roughly 1,000 BC. The earliest evidence of human creativity sits in our opening cabinet: hand axes, points, hammers and polished implements that built every craft that followed.
75,000 BC ◆ The Latest Ice Age
In 2011, the earliest evidence of human culture was discovered at Blombos Cave, near Mossel Bay. Decorated ochre, shell beads and pigment grinders, pushed the date of symbolic thinking back tens of thousands of years. Our diorama walks you into that Cave.
c. 1075 ◆ 1220 AD
An advanced kingdom on the Limpopo, trading gold and ivory east to Persia, India and China. In 1933 a royal grave on Mapungubwe Hill yielded the gold-foil rhinoceros, sceptre and bowl that are now South Africa's most famous archaeological objects. UNESCO World Heritage since 2003.
Zulu · Xhosa · Ndebele
Seven colours, one triangle. Zulu maidens weave thoughts of love, jealousy and uncertainty into beaded courtship pieces. White next to blue means fidelity and true love, the traditional engagement pendant. Triangles point down for an unmarried woman, up for an unmarried man.
Three billion years of geology. Diamonds, gold, platinum and the rare earths, explained in the cabinets exactly the way Dr Prins teaches them.
~120 million years ago
Four routes to the surface. Extinct kimberlite volcanoes at Kimberley, Cullinan and Koffiefontein. Alluvial gravels carried by old rivers. Marine concessions on the Atlantic coast. And the deep-sea mining vessels still producing today.
2,000 million years ago ◆ today
In 2010, South Africa produced 100% of the world's chrome, 75% of the world's platinum and 39% of the world's palladium. The Bushveld Igneous Complex holds the largest reserve of platinum-group metals on earth, and the Witwatersrand ‘banket’ built the modern gold trade.
The largest gem-quality diamond ever found, recovered in 1905 from the Premier Mine, near Pretoria. Now nine stones set into the British Crown Jewels. The whole story sits in a single cabinet.
The Transvaal government bought it for £150,000 and presented it to King Edward VII on his 66th birthday. Asscher of Amsterdam took two years to plan the split. The stone produced nine major stones (Cullinan I through IX) and 96 smaller ones. The two largest sit in the Sovereign's Sceptre and the Imperial State Crown.
Marking, sawing, bruting, blocking, brillianteering, acid wash. The polishing of the hardest material on earth.
The rare zinc, lead and cobalt minerals that built southern Africa's gem economy. From the Copperbelt and Broken Hill mines.
Pb.Cu(VO4)OH
Lead-copper vanadate. Olive-green, rare. Oxidised lead deposits.
CuCo2S4
Copper-cobalt sulphide. Silver-grey. Katanga Copperbelt.
CuSO4 · 7H2O
Hydrated copper sulphate. Deep blue. Forms in mine drainage.
Zn3(PO4)2 · 4H2O
Zinc phosphates. Rust-orange. Broken Hill, Zambia.
Cu2PO4(OH)
Copper phosphate hydroxide. Olive to dark green. Named for Ľubietová.
CoCO3
Cobalt carbonate. The pink comes entirely from cobalt. Kakanda, DRC.
Cu8Si8O22(OH)4
Copper silicate hydroxide. Azure-blue. Tantara mine, Katanga.
REE · U · Zn · Pb
Rare-earth, uranium, zinc and lead specimens on the same shelf.
Specialty stones, organic gemstones, and the African colour parcels Dr Prins sourced directly from the mining regions.
Phenomena of light · organic gems
Alexandrite that shifts from purple to bluish-green between light sources. Moonstone with its inner aqueous glow. Labradorite's twinned atomic structure splitting white light into spectral colour. Star ruby and sapphire with their needle-like rutile asterism.
East Africa · loose-stone trays
The Umba River in northeastern Tanzania produces sapphires in a spectrum unrivalled anywhere on earth, violet, pink, orange padparadscha, green, yellow and the rare 'umba-grey'. Same corundum, different trace elements. The drawer holds a working parcel.
The most photographed dress in South African pageant history, now quietly held in our gallery, kindly donated to the museum by Anneline Kriel.
On 22 November 1974, at the Miss World Pageant, the winner Anneline Kriel, wore this dress adorned with 272 replica Krugerrands. The weight of real Krugerrands would have buckled her knees. The Krugerrand coin, launched a few years earlier, remains the world's most-sold gold coin, with over 50 million in circulation.
The unit that became the carat. The carob seed is so uniform in weight that ancient gem traders used it as their reference standard. The English word ‘carat’ is a direct loan from the Greek kerátion, the carob seed. Antique brass balances, calibrated weight sets and original dried pods on display.
The educational cabinet that quietly upgrades the way you look at jewellery. Bring your own piece, Dr Prins will tell you.
A working display of the two production techniques: computer-assisted (CAD/CAM) and lost-wax casting, versus hand-made using mind-eye-hand skills.
Two Techniques · One Atelier
See the different phases of CAD/CAM production, Lost Wax Casting, Stone setting and Surface finishing. On the middle shelf a display of centuries-old hand tools. On the lower shelf, the metal compositions of different precious metal alloys are visually displayed.