The Court Jeweller

Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World

This Week in Royal Jewels: February 21-27

by // Leave a Comment

February 21-27, 2014
As we wrap up February, here are the top jewel stories of the week!

10. The simple jewels that Queen Maxima wore to welcome home the Dutch Olympic team on Tuesday was overshadowed just a bit by all the hardware that the athletes brought back from Sochi. (Seriously, does everyone in the Netherlands skate that fast???)

9. During a visit to the Spanish National Ballet on Monday, Queen Sofia let her spangled jacket take center stage, pairing it with simple gold jewelry.
8. Royal photographers got a close-up view of Queen Mathilde’s bracelet and watch during a seminar on cyber-bullying on Thursday — wonderful to get to see even simple royal jewels so clearly!
7. Courtesy the Luxarazzi blog, here’s a rare look at a piece of jewelry that once belonged to the princely family of Liechtenstein: the ruby and diamond tiara of Archduchess Elisabeth of Austria.
6. The Bourbon-Parma branch of the Dutch royal family grew a bit this week, with the birth of Princess Zita, the first child of Prince Jaime and Princess Viktoria. As she is a descendant of Queen Juliana, I think we can expect to see this little princess (who was named after her father’s great-aunt, the last empress of Austria) wearing pieces from the family’s jewel foundation one day.
5. For a rather windy visit to Portsmouth on Wednesday, the Duchess of Cornwall wore her Nelson diamond brooch, which she generally dons at events related to the Royal Navy.
4. To welcome German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Buckingham Palace on Thursday, Queen Elizabeth II chose a diamond and pearl brooch from the collection of one of her own German ancestors: Princess Augusta of Hesse-Kassel, the wife of Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge (and grandmother of Queen Mary). The Queen inherited the Duchess of Cambridge’s brooch from Queen Mary in 1953.
3. Also on Thursday, the Queen wore her Cartier aquamarine clips for the presentation of the Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for Higher and Further Education. The clips were given to her by her parents in 1944 as an eighteenth birthday gift.
2. A poster at the Royal Jewels of the World Message Board has posted a complete inventory of the jewels that belonged to the late Princess Lilian of Sweden, including their assessed value. As you may expect, two pieces from the collection of Crown Princess Margareta — the diamond laurel wreath tiara and the scarab necklace — were among the most valuable.
1. And finally, this week the Swedish royal family welcomed a new member: Princess Leonore, the newborn daughter of Princess Madeleine. Some were surprised that the baby was given a title, but I, for one, am thrilled — Queen Estelle is going to need a buddy to help show off the Bernadotte jewel collection in a few years!

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Banner image: detail of The Marriage of George, Duke of York to Princess Mary of Teck (1894) by Laurits Tuxen. Image in the public domain; source here.

Royal Amethysts

by // Leave a Comment

Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway [1]
February is quickly drawing to a close, but I didn’t want to let the month fly away without paying tribute to its royal purple birthstone, the amethyst. Here’s a roundup of some of my favorite amethysts in royal and noble collections. (Spoiler alert — the amethysts above are sadly not included!) Add your picks below in the comments!
Victoria, Duchess of Kent [2]
The Kent Amethysts
One of the rare parures in the British royal collection that lacks a tiara, the Kent amethysts originally belonged to Queen Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent. The set includes a necklace, earrings, three brooches, and a pair of hair combs. Queen Victoria inherited the demi-parure from her mother, and she bequeathed the set to the crown on her own death in 1901.
Elizabeth II wears a single brooch from the set most frequently, but she wore the necklace, one of the brooches, and the earrings on a state visit to Portugal in 1984. Leslie Field notes that the Queen “appears to have no special affection for the stone, as she has worn the Kent suite only twice in public” [3]. HM also owns another amethyst necklace, a wedding gift from Queen Alexandra to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, that she has apparently never worn in public at all. (It was worn at the premiere of Skyfall by the Duchess of Cornwall.) And then there’s the famous case of Queen Mary’s amethysts, which the Queen refused for the royal collection. Too bad for those who want to see her wearing more royal purple — but at least the amethysts that remain in the Windsor vaults have a centuries-old royal provenance.
The Napoleonic Amethyst Parure

Among the number of impressive parures owned by the Swedish royals is perhaps the best royal amethyst set of all: the Napoleonic amethysts. Given by Empress Joséphine to her daughter-in-law, Augusta of Bavaria, the amethysts came to Sweden with Augusta’s daughter, Joséphine. They’ve remained with the family ever since, and today they are a part of the family’s jewel foundation. The set was given a makeover in the 1970s that included transforming a large necklace into a tiara; today, the parure consists of a tiara, a pair of bracelets that can also be worn as a necklace, earrings, and a series of brooches and pins. The lovely, deep-purple stones are worn by all three of the senior Bernadotte ladies — Silvia, Victoria, and Madeleine — at various white-tie events.

Queen Alexandra [4]

Queen Alexandra’s Amethysts
The current queen of the United Kingdom may not be the biggest fan of amethysts, but her great-grandmother, Queen Alexandra, absolutely loved them. The amethyst tiara she wears at right was given to her by her brother-in-law, Tsar Alexander III of Russia, who was married to Alexandra’s sister, Dagmar The tsars had access to one of the best sources of high-quality amethysts in the world: the amethyst mines of Siberia. The tiara featured seven of those large, oval-shaped Siberian amethysts set in diamonds. Alexandra later also commissioned an amethyst necklace (which could also be converted into a tiara) to coordinate with the tiara she already owned. Both of the amethyst pieces were inherited by her daughter, Princess Louise, in 1925; they were sold at auction twenty years later. In recent years, Alexandra’s amethyst necklace has popped up in public twice: once at the tiara exhibition at the V&A in 2002, and then again in 2007, when it was once again put up for auction [5].

The Tavistock Amethysts
Some of the most gorgeous amethysts of all belong not to a royal family but to a British aristocratic family. The Russells, who hold the Bedford dukedom, have a necklace and tiara set with beautiful wine-colored amethysts [6]. (The set takes its name from one of the dukedom’s subsidiary titles, the Tavistock marquessate.) The grape-colored stones were set around 1870 into a tiara of diamond leaves. The entire effect is delightfully Dionysian — which makes perfect sense, as the word “amethyst” roughly translates to “not intoxicated” in the original Greek. The Greeks believed that those who wore the stone were protected against drunkenness. I don’t know about that, but I think anyone who gets to wear amethysts as lovely as these is very lucky indeed!


NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped version of photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
2. Cropped version of an image in the public domain; source here.
3. See The Queen’s Jewels, p. 20.
4. Cropped version of photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
5. See details from the 2007 auction of the necklace here.
6. A large photograph of one of the Bedford duchesses wearing the set is available in Scarisbrick’s Ancestral Jewels (see p. 165)

Princess Louise’s Forget-Me-Not Tiara

by // Leave a Comment

Princess Louise, Princess Royal and Duchess of Fife, ca. 1905 [1]
It’s time once more to peek into the jewel collection of our magpie of the month, everybody! I’ve saved one of the most intriguing pieces from Princess Louise’s jewels for last: her diamond floral tiara, composed of several diamond elements — and possibly seen in recent years on a popular television drama.
The tiara, seen above, is actually composed of multiple pieces of jewelry cobbled together. It includes a diamond floral spray and a series of floral brooches, including daisies and forget-me-nots. The pieces were all from among Louise’s wedding gifts, though there are conflicting reports about the identity of the giver. Ursula identifies two parties who gave the princess diamond floral garlands and/or floral brooches: Lord Farquhar, the best man at the wedding, and the Sassoon family. She suggests that the tiara may be composed of parts from both gifts [2].
Louise was photographed in the tiara in 1905, standing alongside her mother, Queen Alexandra, and her sister, Princess Victoria. It’s the best portrait that exists of Louise wearing the tiara, and to my knowledge, she wasn’t pictured in the tiara again after that occasion. Exactly what happened to the tiara is something of a mystery — the pieces were likely inherited by one of her daughters, Alexandra or Maud; some of the jewels that they received from their mother were later sold at auction.

In 2012, a new theory emerged about this tiara’s fate. That year, Lady Mary Crawley, one of the main characters in Downton Abbey, the famous ITV period drama, wore a diamond floral spray tiara in her wedding on the show. That tiara was borrowed by the production company from Bentley & Skinner, a London-based firm that acquires and sells antique jewels. They describe Lady Mary’s wedding tiara as an “important Georgian diamond tiara, the tiara in the form of a garland spray of leaves and floral clusters, pave-set throughout with old-cut diamonds, weighing an estimated total of 45 carats, cutdown collet-set in silver to a yellow gold mount, convertible to two brooches, gross weight 75.5 grams on frame, circa 1800” [3].

The tiara currently owned by Bentley & Skinner is not linked by the firm to the diamond spray worn by Princess Louise. However, an article in the Daily Mail claims that the two are indeed the same piece. They call it the “myrtle tiara” and note that it was a gift from the Sassoons to the princess; they also note that it can be dismantled and worn as a set of brooches, “which Princess Louise often did” [4]. The Mail article doesn’t give sources for the information, though as the piece involves its writer, Petronella Wyatt, trying on the tiara under the watchful gaze of a public relations rep from Bentley & Skinner, it seems plausible that they may have shared the information with the paper.

Other jewel watchers aren’t sure about the connection; posters at the Royal Jewels of the World forum have examined the two pieces and decided that there are significant differences between the two [5]. I think it’s also plausible, though, that as Louise received diamond floral sprays from two different guests at her wedding, she may be wearing one spray (possibly the one given to her by Farquhar) in the 1905 photo, while the second, slightly different piece is now owned by Bentley & Skinner (and available for you to rent out for a mere £1,750 a day — plus a  £126,000 deposit! [6]). It’s tough to say for certain, but I am sort of glad that a piece that was perhaps formerly worn by royalty is still accessible to the public today — even if it’s only on television on Sunday evenings.

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped version of a photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
2. See more, including additional photos, at Ursula’s website.
3. The Bentley & Skinner page on the tiara, including a set of photos, can be seen here.
4. You can read the full piece on the tiara from the Mail on their website.
5. Here’s the relevant thread from the message board.
6. Here are the details, again from the Mail.