Happy Birthday to all of the June babies celebrating this month! There are fantastic examples of your birthstone, the glamorous pearl, in royal collections across Europe, and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands recently wore some excellent family pearls during a trip to the Philippines.
On May 22, Queen Maxima of the Netherlands was in the Philippines in her capacity as the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development. The role allows Maxima to use the skills she learned while studying economics at university and working in the financial industry before her royal marriage. The United Nations website describes Maxima as “a leading global voice on advancing universal access to and responsible usage of affordable, effective and safe financial services.”
For a roundtable discussion on the topic of financial inclusion, Queen Maxima wore an elegant ensemble in neutral tones, accessorized with pearl and diamond jewelry.
Maxima wore a pair of earrings featuring diamond floral studs and gorgeous pearl drops. The diamond rosette earrings are part of the family jewelry collection, and they can be worn with a variety of different pendants.
With the pearl and diamond earrings, Maxima wore one of the most classic diamond and pearl brooches in the Dutch royal collection: Queen Sophie’s Strawberry Leaf Brooch. The brooch can be worn with the central leaf pointed either up or down, and it can also be worn with a pear-shaped pearl drop, which Maxima has left off on this occasion.
As the name of the jewel suggests, the brooch belonged to Queen Sophie of the Netherlands. Sophie, who was the first wife of King Willem III, was exceptionally well-connected. She was a daughter of King Wilhelm I of Württemberg and his second wife, Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna of Russia, who was a daughter of Tsar Paul I (and, therefore, a granddaughter of Catherine the Great).
Sophie had an exceptional jewelry collection, and many pieces survive in the Dutch royal vaults today. In the portrait above, painted by the famed royal portraitist Franz Xaver Winterhalter in 1863, Queen Sophie wears the diamond and pearl strawberry leaf brooch pinned to her bodice.
The brooch has been worn by generations of the Dutch royal family, but it became particularly associated in the last century with Princess Beatrix. She even pinned the brooch, complete with its pearl drop, to the bodice of her gown on her wedding day in 1966.
In typical Maxima fashion, she also wore stacks of bracelets on each wrist and rings on both hands.
On her left arm, she wore a stack that included both her diamond wedding bracelet and her family diamond initial bracelet. On her right, she paired her gold and cabochon bracelet (which also features the names of her husband and their daughters) with a slender gold bangle and a classic single-stranded pearl bracelet.
She wore her engagement and wedding rings on her left hand, and on her right, she wore a gorgeous diamond and pearl cluster ring. I’ll leave you today with this excellent close-up view of that pearl ring and its interesting diamond scroll surround.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.