Biography
Alexandra Starp joined the Gold Boxes department at Sotheby’s, London, in 2017 and was appointed Head of Department in 2023. Significant auctions with which she was involved include property from a direct descendant of the Bonaparte family (2018) and the Collection of the Comtesse de Ribes in Paris (2019), where the magnificent gold and hardstone snuff box by Dresden court jeweller Johann Christian Neuber became the most important gold box ever to be sold at auction. Two important private collections followed in London - A Treasury of Vertu and A Collection of a Connoisseur (2020), as well as successful single owner sales in Geneva (2022, 2024, 2025), Paris and New York. In 2024 she was in charge of cataloguing the collection of over a thousand snuff boxes from the Alan and Simone Hartman collection in New York, subsequently sold in a series of sales.
Alexandra wrote her Masters dissertation on previously unidentified Hanau goldsmiths, confirming the city‘s significance as a major centre of snuffbox production in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and she pursues a strong academic interest in the field. In 2025, her essay on the subject was published as part of the catalogue of the Iakobachvili collection (‘Grosse Bijouterie in Hanau in the Early 19th Century’, in Haydn Williams, 19th Century Snuffboxes: The David and Mikhail Iakobachvili Collection, vol II, London, 2025, pp. 217-225).
Alexandra also works on privately published collection catalogues and advises on private sales within the category. Reinforcing the position as the market leader in the field of gold boxes, Sotheby’s remains the only auction house with a dedicated Gold Boxes specialist globally.
