Barbra Streisand’s best investment might not have been a film or an album. In 1979, she bought a Tiffany “cobweb”-pattern table lamp from Lillian Nassau’s antique shop in Manhattan for $55,000. Fifteen years later, she sold it at Christie’s for $717,500, a profit of roughly $662,500 on a single piece of stained glass.
The lamp went under the hammer in March 1994 as part of a broader $5.77 million sale of Streisand’s furnishings, and at the time, it was the second-highest price ever paid for a Tiffany lamp at auction. It actually sold below its presale estimate of $800,000 to $1 million, proof that even a strong result can still come in under what an auction house hoped for.
Why a Lamp Can Be Worth More Than a House
Tiffany lamps from the Gilded Age glass studio remain some of the most collectible decorative objects in the world, and prices for rare patterns routinely reach seven figures. A “Magnolia” floor lamp attributed to Tiffany glass artist Agnes Northrop, unrelated to Streisand, later sold at Sotheby’s for $4.4 million after a ten-minute bidding war, more evidence of how far this niche of the antiques market has run.
Streisand’s lamp is a smaller, more personal example of the same dynamic: a piece bought decades ago for what seemed like a lot of money at the time, worth more than ten times that once collectors decided it was worth chasing.
What do you think? Would you have kept the lamp or cashed out like Streisand did? Let us know your thoughts in the comments on BeezLoop.com!
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