Queen Silvia’s Dazzling Royal Birthday Diamonds in Stockholm

Another glittering gala event on our catch-up list comes from Stockholm, where the Swedish royal family held a grand celebration in honor of the recent 80th birthday of Queen Silvia.

King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden hosted a private dinner at the Royal Palace in Stockholm celebrating his wife, who turned 80 in December. Delightfully, the royal court decided to share a photograph from the dinner with the public, showing the King in elegant black tie and the Queen wearing a red evening dress festooned with fabric roses, as well as several pieces of heirloom diamond jewelry from the Bernadotte family collection.

Today, let’s take a closer look at the history of the earrings and hair ornament that Silvia chose for the private birthday dinner: the Karl Johan Earrings and the Braganza Rose Brooch.

Queen Silvia has had access to the earrings and brooch, as well as the entire royal jewelry collection, since her wedding to King Carl XVI Gustaf in the spring of 1976. The Karl Johan Earrings have been particular favorites over the years. The earrings take their name from the reign during which they were constructed. King Carl (or Karl) XIV Johan was the first Bernadotte monarch of Sweden, reigning from 1818 until his death in 1844.

The French-born King was a rare example of a monarch who was chosen by the people. King Carl XIII, whose reign began in 1809, had no living legitimate heirs. When he suffered a health crisis, the Swedish legislature began hunting for a suitable heir to be adopted into the monarchy. They eventually landed on Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, one of Napoleon’s generals, who arrived in Sweden in 1810, becoming the nation’s crown prince and then monarch.

The earrings are a part of the Swedish royal family’s jewelry foundation. Silvia wore them in public for the first time on the eve of her royal wedding in June 1976, pairing them with the Connaught Diamond Tiara for a pre-wedding gala concert.

Part of the charm of the earrings is the easy way that they coordinate with numerous tiaras from the royal family’s extensive collection. One of Silvia’s favorite combinations is the earrings and Queen Sofia’s Tiara, another nineteenth-century jewelry heirloom.

Silvia has also sometimes worn the earrings with the grandest Swedish tiara of all, the Braganza Tiara, which was originally worn by an Empress of Brazil. Above, Silvia wears the earrings with the tiara for her husband’s Golden Jubilee banquet at the Royal Palace in Stockholm last September.

For both the Golden Jubilee banquet and the private birthday dinner, Queen Silvia wore the Braganza Rose Brooch. While she pinned it to her sash for the banquet, she wore the jewel as an ornament in her hair for her birthday celebration.

The elegant brooch matches the floral design motifs of its coordinating tiara. The suite made its way from imperial Brazil to Sweden via Queen Josefina of Sweden, who inherited the parure from her sister, Empress Amélie.

The jewel has been a popular piece with the ladies of the Bernadotte family for more than 150 years. Above, Crown Princess Victoria wears it on the sash of the Order of the Seraphim at the Nobel Prize ceremony in December 2018.

Here’s one more look at Silvia wearing the earrings and brooch, plus a classic diamond rivière necklace from the family collection, during her birthday dinner on June 15.