The Court Jeweller

Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World

Review: Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration

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Caroline de Guitaut’s Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration (2012) [1]
Without many of the wonderful books published over the years on royal jewelry, this blog wouldn’t be able to exist. I get lots of questions from readers about which books I recommend for their growing collections, so I thought I’d do one better and review some of the major books here at The Court Jeweller. We’re kicking off this series with one of the books that came out to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II — Caroline de Guitaut’s Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration.

First off, the specs. This book is deceptively small, but it includes 120 pages of information about the diamonds in the British royal collection, along with detailed photographs of selected pieces. Caroline de Guitaut, the book’s author, is the Curator of Decorative Arts for the Royal Collection. The book itself was published by the Royal Collection Trust as a “souvenir album” and companion to the summer 2012 exhibition of the queen’s diamonds at Buckingham Palace. It’s not the big, comprehensive book to come out of the Diamond Jubilee — that would be Hugh Roberts’s excellent The Queen’s Diamonds. But this one is considerably lighter, smaller, and less expensive. If you’re new to the world of British royal jewels, I would start here rather than splashing out the money for Roberts’s book. If you like this one, the bigger one will definitely also be your cup of tea. If you’ve already got the Roberts book, though, I’m not sure you need this one, too.
Queen Elizabeth II [2]
The book features approximately twenty of the most significant and historical diamond pieces currently in the Royal Collection, including crowns, tiaras, necklaces, earrings, brooches, and bracelets. A significant amount of space is devoted to the Cullinan Diamond in its various forms and mountings. There are pieces here from the Greville inheritance, from the Delhi Durbar suite, and from Queen Victoria’s coronation jewels. Two pieces have been selected (the South African diamonds and the Williamson brooch) from among the current queen’s personal jewels. And some of the big diamond tiaras are represented, too: Queen Alexandra’s Russian Kokoshnik, the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Delhi Durbar. Photographs of individual pieces are interspersed with portraits of royal women actually wearing the diamonds.
But rather unusually for books on royal jewels, Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration also discusses a few other bejeweled items, including some pieces that would have belonged to male royals. I like this inclusion — jeweled objects are so often overlooked when royal collections are considered, but each of these four pieces (Queen Alexandra’s coronation fan, the Jaipur sword, Frederick the Great’s snuff box, and George IV’s sword) is given the same treatment as the wearable objects, including close-up photographs and provenance information.
Along with the individual entries, de Guitaut also provides a history of diamonds in the royal family’s possession and a helpful glossary of jewel terminology. All in all, while this book is nowhere close to covering the breadth of the diamonds in the royal collection, it’s a carefully and deliberately curated look at some of the most significant pieces owned by the Windsors. For those of us who weren’t lucky enough to visit Buckingham Palace and see the Diamond Jubilee exhibit in person, this little souvenir volume is also our chance to experience a bit of the glitter in our own homes.

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Image of book cover from Amazon.com.

2. Detail of photograph of Elizabeth II, available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.

Margaret of Connaught’s Khedive Tiara

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Crown Princess Margareta, ca. 1908 [1]
Margaret of Connaught had a number of tiaras at her disposal during her tenure as crown princess of Sweden, but none of the others are quite as romantic and sentimental as today’s piece: the Cartier tiara given to her as a wedding gift by the Khedive of Egypt.
Margaret of Connaught [2]

The Khedive tiara’s story begins even before the piece’s creation. Margaret, the niece of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, was on a royal tour with her parents, who wanted to marry their daughters off to suitable royal spouses. They had their eye on the future king of Sweden, Gustaf VI Adolf, as a prospective partner for Margaret’s sister, Princess Patricia. They rendezvous-ed with Gustaf Adolf in Cairo, where he immediately fell in love — but with the wrong sister. It didn’t matter, in the end; Margaret was in love with him, too. Gustaf Adolf proposed to her during a dinner at the British consulate in Cairo, and the two were married at Windsor in 1905.

As the young couple had met in his country, it was important that the Khedive of Egypt — the governor of the country, which was ruled by the British at the time — give them a suitable wedding present. He commissioned Cartier to make this tiara for the occasion. The piece, which has alternately been described as a scroll tiara and as a tiara featuring marguerite motifs, bears considerable similarity to another piece made for the Egyptians at roughly the same time: Princess Shwikar’s tiara. That piece has never been firmly attributed to Cartier, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the same jeweler was behind both sparklers.

Margaret wore the piece during her time as Sweden’s crown princess, both as a tiara and as a dress ornament. You can see her wearing the Khedive on the bodice of her dress in the portrait shown at left above (where she wears the diamond tiara given to her by her parents as a diadem). The way that Margaret has positioned the piece in the portrait fits with its depiction in the illustrated guide to her wedding gifts (see below). When worn as a tiara, the piece is flipped so that the scroll elements are at the base.

Illustration of the tiara/ornament from Margaret of Connaught’s wedding gifts [3]
Unfortunately, Margaret had little time to experiment with her tiara collection. When she died in 1920, this tiara was one of the jewels that was inherited by her only daughter, Princess Ingrid. She brought the tiara with her to Denmark when she married Crown Prince Frederik (later Frederik IX) in 1935. Ingrid didn’t wear this piece on her wedding day [4], but it was through her influence that it has become the official wedding tiara for all of her female descendants in the years since.

Ingrid of Denmark [5]

So far, the bridal wearers of the Khedive have been Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (see here); Princess Benedikte of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg (see here); Benedikte’s two daughters, Princess Alexandra (here) and Princess Nathalie (here); Queen Anne-Marie of Greece (see here); and her elder daughter, Princess Alexia (here). Anne-Marie’s younger daughter, Princess Theodora, will also be eligible to wear the tiara if she marries. After Ingrid’s death in 2000, she left the tiara to her younger daughter, Anne-Marie, the former queen of Greece. Anne-Marie has had alterations made to the base of the piece [6], so that it sits much higher now on the wearer’s head (you can clearly see these changes in wedding photos of Nathalie of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, the only bride to have worn it so far after it was altered).

It will be extremely interesting to see what happens to the Khedive tiara in the next generation. Will Anne-Marie leave it to one of her daughters, who are no longer princesses of a reigning monarchy? Will it be returned to the Danes, to preserve it officially as a wedding tiara for the next generation of royal brides? (That will include three Danish princesses — Isabella, Josephine, and Athena — as well as the granddaughters of Benedikte and Anne-Marie.) Cases like the Khedive, which has both historical and familial importance, make me wish that Ingrid had followed the example of Juliana of the Netherlands and set up a foundation for her jewelry. But for now, only time will tell [7].

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped version of photograph in the public domain; source here. (The Grand Ladies website suggests that the photograph may have been made to advertise Margaret to potential grooms, but if the photo really was taken in 1908, that’s not possible.)
2. Portrait of Crown Princess Margareta of Sweden by Axel Jungstedt, ca. 1909; source here.
3. Detail of the illustrated newspaper guide to Margaret’s wedding gifts; a full version of the image available here.
4. Here’s an image of Frederik and Ingrid on their wedding day in 1935. While neither Margaret nor Ingrid wore the Khedive as a bridal tiara, they both wore the same Irish lace veil that Margaret had been given as a wedding gift. All of Ingrid’s female descendants, plus Crown Princess Mary, have also worn the veil on their wedding days. In a bit of morbid trivia, the same veil covered Margaret of Connaught’s body in her coffin, though the veil was removed before the coffin was closed so that it could be given to Ingrid.
5. Cropped version of photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
6. See the tiara’s new base here.
7. A version of this post originally appeared at A Tiara a Day in February 2013.

Birthday Jewels: The Countess of Wessex

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The Earl and Countess of Wessex at Trooping the Colour, June 2013 [1]
Happy birthday to one of the most dependable and lovely members of the British royal family, the Countess of Wessex! It’s tough to believe that Sophie turns 49 today — she somehow seems to look younger with each passing year. (Someone should check the attic at Bagshot Park for a portrait, perhaps?) To celebrate Sophie’s big day, let’s have a look at some of her more affordable jewels: the earrings she wears from Heavenly Necklaces.
Founded in the early 1990s by Belinda Hadden, Heavenly Necklaces specializes in costume jewelry (though they also make pieces with genuine semi-precious stones). You might be surprised that a senior royal like Sophie, who has some major precious jewelry of her own and also often borrows pieces from her mother-in-law’s stupendous collection, would wear costume pieces. But more and more, royals are mixing precious jewels with less expensive pieces. This has been true for years — Diana, Princess of Wales often wore both heirloom and faux jewelry. And there’s a long history of wealthy women ordering costume replicas of their most valuable jewels; some would even wear replica pieces in public, while keeping the real things locked securely away in safes and bank vaults, far from sticky-fingered thieves.
Left: Sophie wears the Non-Drop Drop earrings [2];
Right: the earrings pictured on the HN website [3]
Many of Sophie’s pairs of earrings come from the Heavenly Necklaces collection. At Trooping the Colour last June, she sported a pair of Hadden’s “Non-Drop Drops,” which the website advertises as their third best-selling earrings. They feature a small cubic zirconia stud with a larger circle of cubic zirconias suspended from it. Trooping the Colour is one of the most visible occasions of the year for members of the royal family, and Sophie wore the earrings during both a carriage procession down the Mall and on the famous Buckingham Palace balcony. Sophie also wore the earrings at a Buckingham Palace reception last fall in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who [4]. Sophie has a number of other earrings from the company, including their “Cannes-deliers,” which feature teardrop-shaped cubic zirconias in an articulated pattern [5], and their snowflake earrings, which she wore on an outing at Royal Ascot with her husband and daughter in December [6]. She’s also been photographed in their solitaire drop earrings — she’s definitely a dedicated customer!
Left: Kate wears the Pearl and Diamond earrings [7];
Right: the earrings pictured on the HN website [8]

Both Sophie and her nephew’s wife, the Duchess of Cambridge, have purchased inexpensive jewels from Hadden’s company. In fact, they both own a pair of one of the firm’s most famous pieces: their pearl and diamond drop earrings. These baubles gained public attention when Kate wore them at one of the biggest royal events of 2012: the thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral for Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. After Kate wore the £58 earrings on the balcony at Buckingham Palace, Hadden was inundated with orders. These earrings, which Sophie also wears quite frequently, are perhaps now the most famous item that Heavenly Necklaces makes, so much so that they even garnered a mention in the publication accompanying the “Pearls” exhibition currently on at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

I love precious, rare, heirloom royal jewels as much as the next person (honestly, probably way more than the next person, really), but I also find the use of costume jewelry refreshing. Sometimes it’s nice to salivate over a piece of jewelry, only to discover that you can afford to purchase it for your own collection. If you’d like to see more of these Heavenly Necklaces pieces in action, I’d highly recommend visiting Anna’s sites, My Small Obsessions and HRH Countess of Wessex. She’s the resident expert on Sophie’s jewels on the ‘net today, and she also has a small collection of Heavenly Necklaces pieces of her own. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just need to go decide which of their pieces I need to add to my own jewelry box…

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped version of photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
2. Cropped version of photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
3. Cropped version of photograph available at the Heavenly Necklaces website.
4. See photographs here at the Mail Online website.
5. See Anna’s My Small Obsessions facebook page for photos.
6. See photographs here at the Hello! website.
7. Cropped version of photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
8. Cropped version of photograph available at the Heavenly Necklaces website.