Saturday Sparkler

Queen Victoria’s Sapphire Coronet Goes on Display

04.13.2019 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for The V&A

The wait is over — museum-goers in London can now come face to face with one of Queen Victoria’s most famous jewels!

Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for The V&A

The Sapphire Coronet, designed for Victoria by Prince Albert, is now on permanent display in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It is part of the museum’s large jewelry collection, on display in the William and Judith Bollinger Gallery.

Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for The V&A

Because the jewel is now the centerpiece of the museum’s permanent jewel display, there is no cost to visitors who want to see it in person. You can get up-close in personal with the teeny diadem, made in 1840 and famously worn by Victoria in a Winterhalter portrait.

Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for The V&A

As we discussed in our earlier post on the coronet, the diadem was also one of the rare pieces of jewelry set with colored stones that Victoria wore after Albert’s death in 1861. Most notably, she wore the piece for the State Opening of Parliament in 1866. (You can read my detailed history of the coronet over here!)

Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for The V&A

The museum closed the Bollinger Gallery earlier this year for a three-month renovation ahead of the coronet’s debut. As you can see in the background above, the room is jam-packed with jewels, including a total of eighty new pieces. The jewelry gallery at the museum is one of the places that first inspired my love of fantastic jewelry, and if you haven’t visited yet, be sure to add it to your list!

Crown Princess Cecilie’s Faberge Tiara

04.06.2019 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

Sotheby’s

The world learned recently that another heirloom tiara from a former royal family is hitting the sale room this year. Here’s a closer look at the tiara in question: a diamond sparkler from the collection of the last German crown princess.

Sotheby’s

The kokoshnik-style tiara was made around 1903, and although it is unsigned, it has often been attributed to Fabergé. (A similar Fabergé tiara was included in Geoffrey Munn’s landmark tiara tome.) The lot notes from Sotheby’s describe this tiara as “set with three circular-cut diamonds framed with stylised laurels within an arched surround of lattice work design joined with rose diamond quatrefoils.”

Sotheby’s

The tiara features three distinctive circular elements set in the middle of the tiara’s lattice and quatrefoil design. The lot notes indicate that the central element is definitely detachable, but it does not specify whether the smaller two elements can be removed. (The lot notes also reveal that six small diamonds are missing from the diadem.)

Philip de Laszlo’s portrait of Crown Princess Cecilie, ca. 1908 (Wikimedia Commons)

The tiara was one of the wedding presents given to Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin when she married Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in June 1905. The sparkler was a gift from Cecilie’s Russian relatives — her mother was the fascinating Grand Duchess Anastasia Mikhailovna of Russia, a granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I. Anastasia herself may have had a hand in selecting the tiara; Fabergé was her favorite jewelry firm, and the lot notes for the tiara state that “correspondence between the jeweller and [Anastasia] herself, mentioning a diamond tiara, exists.”

Crown Princess Cecilie was photographed wearing the tiara, but it was her daughter, Princess Cecilie, who perhaps made the most significant appearance in the diadem. After the end of World War II, the younger Cecilie fell in love with an American designer named Clyde Harris. He was one of the Monuments Men, the group of American soldiers tasked with recovering priceless works of art that had gone missing during the war. Harris, who hailed from Amarillo, Texas, was sent to Wolfsgarten Castle to investigate the famous theft of the Hessian royal jewels. During that investigation, he met Cecilie. After a lengthy correspondence, the couple decided to marry.

The wedding took place in June 1949 at Hohenzollern Castle. The wedding guest list was populated by both royals and Texans, including the mayor of Amarillo and the editor of the Amarillo News-Globe. The American press reported on all the details, including Cecilie’s attire: “A peaked diamond tiara glittered on the bride’s head, holding the plain tulle veil her sister-in-law brought her from London. The tiara had belonged to her mother’s mother, a grand duchess of Russia.” (Perhaps that last detail helps confirm Anastasia’s central role in the tiara’s creation and acquisition?

Mr. Harris and his new bride settled after their wedding in Amarillo, where they later welcomed a daughter, Kira Alexandrine Harris. (Her names paid tribute to Cecilie’s sister-in-law, Princess Kira, and her aunt, Queen Alexandrine of Denmark.) Cecilie even became an American citizen. Sadly, Clyde and Cecilie’s happiness was short-lived. Clyde died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1958. He was only 59. Cecilie lived until 1975, dying on a trip to her native Germany.

Sotheby’s

The lot notes for the sale of Princess Cecilie’s wedding tiara do not indicate the identity of the seller. Instead, they merely explain that it was inherited by a family member after the death of Crown Princess Cecilie in 1954. The tiara will be auctioned in Geneva on May 14. It is currently expected to fetch between $200,000 and $300,000.

Queen Olga’s Diamond Tiara

03.30.2019 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

Queen Olga wears her diamond tiara (Grand Ladies Site)

Queen Olga of the Hellenes was both Greece’s queen consort and a Russian grand duchess, so you know she had a packed jewelry box. Today we’re talking about one of her favorite pieces, her diamond tiara.

Grand Ladies Site

Grand Duchess Olga Constantinovna, a granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, married King George I of the Hellenes in 1867. This tiara features in numerous formal images from her time as Greece’s queen, including this court portrait, painted early in her husband’s reign. The diadem appears to perhaps have been a coronet, wrapping around the wearer’s head. The piece’s diamond festoon base features a series of toppers that appear to have been interchangeable. In some images, like this portrait, the tiara appears to be topped by small round pearls.

Grand Ladies Site

Olga wore the tiara again for this formal photographic portrait, taken later in the nineteenth century. It appears that she often chose a diamond tiara, likely this one, for formal events. A writer for the Ipswich Journal described one of these glittering court functions in Athens in November 1888: “I looked up, and there was the stately form of King George, conspicuous with his orders and blue ribbon. Beside him, on his arm, was Queen Olga, a diamond tiara sparkling on her head.”

Grand Ladies Site

Several images exist from this portrait sitting, including this detailed illustration produced after one of the photographs. Here, the tiara looks like it may have been topped by diamond clusters, perhaps coordinating with the leafy diamond brooch on Olga’s gown.

Wikimedia Commons

Here’s the photograph that illustration was based on. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give us a clearer view of the tiara’s toppers.

Grand Ladies Site

Here, though, we get a good look at the pear-shaped pearls that Olga placed upright on the tiara for a nineteenth-century costume ball.

Wikimedia Commons

Although it features so prominently in images from her husband’s reign, we don’t seem to have clear answers about the tiara’s fate afterward. We know that Olga left her emeralds to her grandson George, and her rubies to her son Nicholas. (Both sets are now with Constantine and Anne-Marie of Greece.) We also know that the grand diamond and pearl brooch pictured above on Olga’s gown was inherited by her second son, George. As some of her jewels were bequeathed together in same-gem groups, maybe the diamond and pearl tiara was left to him as well?

Detail of de Laszlo’s portrait of Queen Olga, ca. 1914 (Wikimedia Commons)

But we also know that Olga was left in a precarious place after her husband’s death in 1913, after which the Greek monarchy plunged into turmoil. In his book on the history of diplomacy between Britain and Greece, Panagiotis Dimitrakis notes that Olga “asked [King George V] personally to intervene with the British legation in Athens to claim some royal jewels locked in a bank vault there. The final part of the message [from Buckingham Palace to the British ambassador] was rather poignant: ‘His Majesty is full of sympathy for Queen Olga who told me that she would have to rely on these jewels for her existence should her allowance be stopped’ after the abolition of the monarchy in Greece.” Olga wouldn’t have been alone in using her jewels as an insurance policy to survive in exile — many royals sold their jewels to fund their new non-royal lives. Perhaps this tiara met a similar fate?