A very special image will be sold in London on November 5 2025.
The original of the portrait of David Bowie used on the cover of Aladdin Sane is predicted to bring in as much as £300,000 before the sale.
And we’re lucky to have the chance to buy “the Mona Lisa of pop”.
The original print of Duffy's Aladdin Sane portrait of David Bowie, but how many images of similar quality were lost? Image courtesy of Bonhams.
To become collectible, items must achieve rarity. Their scarcity can come about in a number of ways. Time has an attritional effect - a coin from 100 AD is almost always rarer than one from 1900 AD - but sometimes time has a helping hand.
War, natural disaster, artistic judgement, politics… they all cut swathes through history’s great (potential
As we’ll find out in this list of destruction of art and collectibles that will make many memorabilia fans weep.
The Duffy fire
To start with that Bowie image, it was the work of the late, great photographer Brian Duffy, almost always known just as Duffy.
His early 60s fashion work put him at the heart of Swinging London. Alongside David Bailey and Terrence Donovan he personified a vibrant, new wave of British culture best exemplified by The Beatles-inspired musical revolution but extending across the arts and culture.
Duffy enjoyed great success, moving effortlessly from the fashion studio to the pop world, portraiture, reportage and more.
Including the legendary Bowie shoot for Aladdin Sane.
And in 1979, he quit. Disillusioned and probably suffering what he later told the BBC was a breakdown of sorts.
Brian Duffy's 1968 self-portrait. By 1979 he'd decided that he'd achieved all he could with the still image.
The Man Who Shot the Sixties heard: “The thing with negatives is they don’t burn as fast as you think they will. I’d thrown them into this fire bin and I just had to stoke them and I was pouring white spirit in to try and keep it going. It was, to be honest, making pretty stinking black smoke.”
That smoke brought Camden council officials to Duffy’s yard, who forced him to put out the fire. But he remained out of photography for the rest of his life, and it was only when his children uncovered his surviving work that his full surviving archive became public knowledge.
How much was destroyed isn’t clear, but it was certainly a significant among of one of the greatest collections of late 20th-century popular culture photography.
The Aardman fire
Wallace and Gromit are beloved of kids, collectors, and, well, almost everyone. Click this image to discover this signed picture.
As a company with roots and offices in Bristol, perhaps we feel a special affinity with Aardman animations.
Certainly, the 2005 fire that destroyed much of the history of Wallace, Gromit, Morph, Creature Comforts and more was keenly felt in the city where they were born.
One October night, an electrical fault started a warehouse blaze where many of the company’s props, sets and models lived. Nick Park, director of Aardman’s biggest hits, typically described the fire as “not a big deal” compared with the Kashmir Earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people at the same time.
Aardman collecting was undoubtedly permanently damaged by the fire.
Sales are still rare. In 2024, an original model of Morph sold for £1,100 and in 2025 a Gromit sculpture made for a fund-raising trail around Bristol was sold for £70,000.
The Russian Faberge eggs
The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia was a great sweeping away of an entire order.
The Winter Egg is due to sell for more than £20 million in December 2025. That leaves another 50 or so Faberge eggs. Image courtesy of Christie's.
Including an awful lot of the sumptuous lifestyle accoutrements of the Romanov Tsars that had caused such resentment among a population many of whom lived in poverty and under repressive church and state authority.
Most famously, the Russian royals were the best customers of the Faberge company, gobbling up their extraordinary eggs, which the last two Tsars gave as gifts to their wives and mothers.
Fifty-two Imperial Eggs were conceived of. One never made it off the drawing board, and another was partially completed before the Tsars were ousted.
Six are missing. They may have been destroyed. Or looted during the Revolution and subsequent civil war. Possibly sold secretly by Soviet authorities who needed cash while considered international pariahs.
Some of these eggs have been traced to a degree, but have disappeared along the way into publicity shy collections. A couple may have remained within the imperial family, which was large and very closely related to much of the rest of European royalty - they could be in a royal collection somewhere.
This mystery has helped inspire a whole industry in faking Faberge’s, charmingly called Fauxberge.
The French Crown Jewels
The original Crown of Charlemagne was used in French coronations for centuries, but it was probably destroyed in 1590 or the 1790s.
The French have largely done without a monarch since 1789, though they’ve actually had three kings and a couple of emperors since then.
But what of the crowns, sceptres, rings and other trinkets that come with the office of leading one of Europe’s leading powers?
They’re all over the place.
A fair number of them are on display in the Louvre and other French museums. (In fact, there’s so much French Crown Jewellery you would struggle to lose, destroy or scatter all of it.)
But, much of it has gone astray and you can look out for bits and pieces sourced from the Royal treasuries at auction. In 2017 a pink diamond traced back to the French Royal collection realised $14 million at auction.
Three major events account for most of this destruction.
In 1590 the Catholic League, participants in the French War of Religion, dispersed (probably selling) a portion of the jewels.
Then, during the French revolution, a large number of items were stolen during rioting, before many of the royal crowns were melted down, and other pieces sold off by the very Louvre curators who’d been asked to protect them.
Finally, after the end of the Second Empire in 1870, the authorities of the Third Republic decided that continued royalist plotting might be ended if there was no literal crown to aim for. In 1887, almost everything precious was sold, completing a process that had begun haphazardly in the early 1870s.
Aimée de Heeren, a Brazilian socialite and secret agent became perhaps the largest holder of French crown jewels thanks to the obsessive gifting of besotted English aristocrat (and Nazi sympathiser) the Second Duke of Westminster.
The only surviving French Ancien Regime Crown is Louis XV’s.
And, in a rather petty tit-for-tat act, restored monarch Louis XVIII destroyed Napoleon’s laurel wreath crown.
The props and sets of 2001 A Space Odyssey
An astronaut floats in space in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you won't find much evidence of how it was done now. Image courtesy of Touring Club of Italy on Wikimedia Commons.
Stanley Kubrick is one of the greatest film directors of all time. And 2001, his take on space exploration, is perhaps his most influential work.
And, it's his most valuable with collectors. Because items from the film are extremely rare.
Kubrick had almost all of them destroyed at the end of shooting. It was a proud boast of the cast and crew that everything on screen had been created in the real world - no computers or trickery.
And Kubrick knew that was special. So he made sure no-one could rip it off.
The destruction was not quite complete, and when items do surface, like a shuttle model sold for $344,000 in 2015, they sell for a substantial premium.
Collector’s items that survive
This just touches on history's destroyed collections. World Wars, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China... and a long line of similar ruptures stretching back to the semi-legendary Burning of the Library at Alexandria destroy culture and collectibles.
Artists, writers and musicians have destroyed work they don't like. Papers from the likes of George Washington, Lord Byron, and Phillip Larkin have been burned to protect posthumous privacy.
And, what will happen to the digital collectibles of today when the power goes off?
Looking after what you have is as important as finding new buys for serious collectors.
And there are treasures from dispersed collections out there to be found: Faberge eggs, French crowns... Who knows.
In all fields of collecting.
Start your digging in our collections now.
