In the elite world of design-driven, high end jewelry, New York-based gemstone dealer Robert Bentley is a treasured source for international luxury brands, independent designers and other insiders who work with colored gemstones of impeccable quality. Bentley is exhibiting this week at the 2025 Tucson Gem and Mineral Show's American Gem Trade Association (AGTA) hall at Booth #322-324. His artistry with gemstones comes naturally, as he's also a serious painter whose fine art studies earned him a BFA degree from Brooklyn's Pratt Institute.
When he's not working with exquisite gems, however, Bentley is painting in his Manhattan art studio, where he also welcomes collectors. "My grandfather was a rock hound who took me with him on many gem and mineral mining adventures when I was a child," Bentley recalled. "Yet drawing and painting have also been central to my identity since early childhood. For as long as I can remember," he related, "I have been compelled to paint, to use the canvas as a place for imagination and remembering. My most recent paintings, "he explained, "are oil on canvas."
While the Robert Bentley Company business card reads, 'Unusual Gemstones,' this appellation is an obvious understatement to those who have viewed his inventory of rare and beautifully cut gems. His extensive inventory spans a broad, enchanting spectrum, from fine facets and uniquely crafted cabochons to natural crystal structures, distinctive crystal surface pieces, fine beads, druzy stones of various shades, as well as stones that embody dramatic and phenomenal inclusions. Swimming pool blue Paraiba tourmaline cabochons, rugged rock crystal beads that have been artfully cut to look like rounded balls of ice and hexagonally cut aquamarine slices the color of a Dutch master sky are just a few examples of Bentley's exotic array.
After spending a few hours in Bentley's showroom, this writer strolled a few blocks north into the luxury retailer Bergdorf Goodman's jewelry salon and easily identified Bentley material in various jewels that sold for five figures and up. Bentley's angularly cut, ruggedly textured black tourmaline shards glittered in a necklace with an 18-karat gold clasp. In another case, multiple strands of smooth oval green peridot beads like the ones just handled chez Bentley, gleamed in a necklace offered by a world-renowned heritage jeweler that's been in business for almost a century.
As the AGTA Spectrum Award-winning jewelry designer Heath London observed, "The first dealer I visit every Tucson Gem and Mineral Show is Robert Bentley." In terms of artistic and elegant gem-cutting, she explained, "No one else does what Bentley does with stones. They are a reflection of his artist's eye for color, shape and texture." The unexpected elements that animate his gems, London asserted, "are what really sets Robert Bentley apart." Forms and textures embodied by Bentley gemstones, London related, include elegant shards, smooth, irregularly shaped ovals and variously shaped matte cubes of such gems as gold-flecked lapis lazuli.
St. Louis, Missouri-based master goldsmith and bespoke jeweler Gayle Eastman is another longtime devotee of Bentley gemstones. "The quality of Robert's gemstone material is difficult to describe because it's so original," Eastman said. "His eye for color and ability to find lapidary artists who can cut gems with such skill makes his inventory special." As Delhi-based jewelry designer Hanut Singh opined after visiting Bentley's showroom with this writer, "Bentley approaches his work with the vision, soul and confidence of an artist."
Working with top-level lapidaries and some of the greatest names in haute luxe jewelry, Robert Bentley is by any objective standard, a consequential colored gemstone dealer, having also served on the AGTA Board of Directors over the course of his career. Befitting an aesthete who has spent decades searching out and selling fine colored gemstones, Bentley's primary muse is the life-giving, beautiful force of Nature. The Adirondack mountains, where he has a cabin, have afforded opportunities to walk in the woods in all four seasons.
Bentley's wilderness walks have in turn inspired his Tree Portraits series. "My Tree Portraits," he explained, "are painted in my studio in Manhattan. They reflect my time communing with and getting to know the trees around my cabin, along with certain paths and clearings." For example, one painting, titled 'The Oxygen Makers,' portrays a dense thicket of towering trees in loving, living colors. The raw beauty of these life forms and the painting's title capture the imagination. If Bentley's Tree Portraits series aims to make us consider how very important trees are to the planet and its life forms, he has succeeded. Then again, if Mr. Bentley aims to manifest the beauty of his muse with originality and technical savoir-faire, he has met that challenge with a gem-like radiance that is equal to the life-giving power of trees.