Lock of Napoleon's hair sells for £9,000: Strands cut during his exile following defeat at the Battle of Waterloo found at Surrey property during house clearance

A house clearer who found a lock of Napoleon Bonaparte's hair in a gold locket at a terraced house in Surrey is celebrating after it sold for £9,000.

The snip of greying hair was taken from the French emperor during his exile on the South Atlantic island of St Helena following his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

The locket was unearthed by the unnamed house clearer who had been called in to remove the contents of a terraced house before it was to be demolished following the death of its owner.

 

Lucky find: A house cleaner who found a lock Napoleon Bonaparte's hair in a gold locket at a terraced house in Surrey is celebrating after it sold for £9,000. It also had a hand-written note inside (right)

An inscription on the back of the case reads: 'Hair of Napoleon 1st St Helena 1816.'

And a handwritten note inside states: 'Obtained by Admiral George Brine when in command of HMS Mosquito guarding Napoleon at St Helena; given by him to my mother; at her death in 1867 given by us to my brother Captain George Brine RN after whose death in 1889 it passed to his widow and at her death in 1890 it came to me.'

 

Inscription: On the back of the gold locket is written: 'Hair of Napoleon 1st St Helena 1816'. The item was put up for sale at auction with a guide price of 1,500 but due to the level of interest in it

The item was put up for sale at auction with a guide price of 1,500 but due to the level of interest in it - ramped up by the bi-centenary year of Waterloo - it sold for a hammer price of 7,500.

With all the fees added on, the anonymous buyer paid 9,000 for the lock of hair and locket, which was found at a house in Camberley, Surrey.

Chris Ewbank, of Surrey auctioneers Ewbanks, said: 'It was a remarkable find.

'We have no idea how the locket came to be in a terraced house in the Camberley area and because of the death of the occupant, we have no way of finding out, but we have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the piece. It has cast iron provenance.

'It was a very good price and a very lucky find.'

Napoleon was exiled to St Helena, a British colony in the Atlantic following his defeat at Waterloo. He died in 1821, from stomach cancer.

Brine would have come into contact with Napoleon during the three years he spent guarding the island during the time HMS Musquito was stationed there.

Brine entered the Navy as a midshipman in 1797 on board the Glory and later served on HMS Victory. 

A Collection From Napoleon III’s Dentist, Now on View at Penn

The University of Pennsylvania is showcasing overlooked bequests from Thomas W. Evans, a 19th-century dentist to European royalty.
Dr. Evans, a Philadelphia native, settled in Paris in the early 1840s and made a fortune pulling teeth and making gold fillings while also investing in real estate. After Dr. Evans died in 1897, Penn’s dental school inherited his estate, including Manet paintings and gold Napoleonic knickknacks. Last week highlights of the collection, which had been scattered for five decades among offices and storage spaces at Penn, went on display in the university’sArthur Ross Gallery.
The exhibition, “Courtly Treasures: The Collection of Thomas W. Evans, Surgeon Dentist to Napoleon III,” running through Nov. 8, includes portraits and statuettes depicting French and Russian rulers, and gold Swiss- and Prussian-made pocket watches studded with diamonds. A black carriage, built in Paris in the 1860s and newly restored by Amish artisans, bears Dr. Evans’s monogram on the doors. In 1870, after Napoleon III’s forces surrendered to the Prussians and the government collapsed, the Empress Eugénie fled Paris inside the carriage. She had persuaded the dentist to drive her to the northern French coast, where a British sympathizer was waiting with a yacht to take her to exile in England.

Dr. Evans recalled in his memoir that they passed various royal palaces: “The very road we were traveling had been a via dolorosa in the history of the Bonaparte family.”
Lynn Marsden-Atlass, Penn’s university curator, and Denis F. Kinane, the dean of Penn’s School of Dental Medicine, led a five-year effort to track down Dr. Evans’s artworks and objects. Ms. Marsden-Atlass said that Dr. Evans’s elite clients “paid him in fabulous objects.” His wife, Agnes, received jewelry, including a diamond-and-emerald bracelet from Eugénie. Manet dedicated a still life of flowers in a crystal vase to “my friend, the Dr. Evans.”

Manet’s mistress and muse Méry Laurent, an actress, also carried on a long affair with Dr. Evans; he supported her in extravagant homes.

After his death, Dr. Evans’s family contested his will. Penn spent years battling family members, and eventually prevailed. Penn used the inheritance to establish the Thomas W. Evans Museum and Dental Institute School of Dentistry. Its galleries, which opened in 1915, closed in 1967.
The collection languished to the point that gold vessels, encrusted with dirt, were mistaken for pewter. In the 1980s, Penn auctioned some of the bequeathed paintings and objects. Two Manet still lifes, including the floral vase scene, sold for about $1 million each. The show’s catalog illustrates and analyzes the painting, which now belongs to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
More Evans material has recently surfaced: a descendant of a lawyer who helped settle the Evans estate has donated papers related to the inheritance battle.

Correction: July 25, 2015 

Because of an editing error, a report in the Antiques column on Friday about an exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania titled “Courtly Treasures: The Collection of Thomas W. Evans, Surgeon Dentist to Napoleon III” misidentified the academic position that Denis F. Kinane holds at the university. He is the dean of the school of dental medicine, not the school of medicine. The article also erroneously included one item among those on exhibit. A still-life painting by Édouard Manet that belonged to Evans can be seen only in the exhibition catalog; it is not in the show.