Saturday Sparkler

The Ancona Tiara

03.03.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

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So often, we hear tales of gorgeous royal tiaras that have graced various regal heads before ultimately being sold at auction. Happily, today’s tiara is something of a reversal of that tale: the Ancona Tiara began in one set of royal hands, and even after being auctioned, it ended up in the collection of another set of royals.

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The original owner of this tiara was a member of the Habsburg branch of the Italian royal family. Some have claimed that the pearl and diamond tiara was made as a wedding gift for Princess Maria Anna of Saxony on her 1817 marriage to Leopold II, the future grand duke of Tuscany, but the exact date of the tiara’s construction is unknown. The pearls in this piece are clearly natural, and their mismatched quality gives the piece a quirky authenticity. Diamond trefoils below encase more pearls, and the base of the diadem is also lined with small round pearls.

Archduchess Maria Isabella (Wikimedia Commons)

After Maria Anna’s death, the tiara ended up in the collection of her successor — her husband’s second wife, Princess Maria Antonia of the Two Sicilies. It was Maria Antonia’s daughter, Archduchess Maria Isabella, who inherited the piece, and the tiara was handed down by her Bourbon-Two Sicilies descendants for the next century. (Maria Isabella married her mother’s brother. Those Habsburgs, seriously.) Her daughter Maria Antoinetta had the tiara next, followed by her son, Ferdinand Pius, Duke of Calabria.

Lydia wears the tiara, ca. 1920s

The last owner of the tiara from its original family line was Ferdinand Pius’s daughter, Princess Lucia of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. In 1938, Lucia married Prince Eugenio of Savoy, Duke of Ancona, hence the name of the tiara. The woman in the photo of the tiara above is not Lucia, however, but her sister-in-law, Lydia d’Arenberg, a Belgian princess who married Eugenio’s elder brother, Filiberto. Most seem to agree that Lucia loaned the tiara to Lydia, who was married to the more senior brother in the family.

Camilla wears the tiara (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

In 1999, the Savoy family put this tiara up for auction. Most of the time, the story would end here. But the buyers of the tiara this time were actually also connected to the original owner of the piece. Prince Carlo of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duke of Castro, happens to be married to Camilla Crociani, the daughter of an extremely wealthy family. The Crocianis reportedly bought the tiara for their daughter.

Camilla wears the tiara (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

As Prince Carlo is also a descendant of Maria Antoinetta of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, the purchase kept the tiara within the family. Camilla wore the tiara for the first time in public at the 2004 wedding of Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, surprising everyone by appearing in an heirloom tiara that many had imagined was lost for good.

Note: This is an updated version of an earlier post, with new text and images.

Queen Emma’s Diamond Tiara

02.24.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

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The Dutch royal vaults are absolutely brimming with tiaras, but today’s deceptively-simple sparkler, Queen Emma’s Diamond Tiara, has been treasured by the women of the family for more than a hundred years.

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The diamond tiara, which features a trio of harp designs with large diamond rosette-style clusters in their centers, is made of silver and gold. It was made for Queen Emma of the Netherlands, the second wife of King Willem III, in 1890 by Royal Begeer. Although it was commissioned for Emma by Willem, the tiara unintentionally turned into a posthumous gift: it was delivered to Emma at the palace shortly after her husband’s death.

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Emma often wore the tiara topped with a series of diamond stars from her collection. She wore it in that configuration for the wedding of her daughter, Queen Wilhelmina, in 1901; her jewels from that occasion are shown in the illustration above, which is based on a photograph.

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Queen Wilhelmina inherited the tiara from her mother, and she also wore it topped with diamond stars, as you can see in the portrait above, taken in the 1930s. The tiara was not a favorite of Wilhelmina’s daughter, Queen Juliana, but as it is now a part of the family’s jewel foundation, it’s been worn by numerous other members of the Dutch royal family.

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The tiara has been one of the go-to sparklers for Juliana’s daughter, Princess Beatrix. When Andy Warhol created a portrait of then-Queen Beatrix for his Reigning Queens series in 1985, he chose to depict her wearing the tiara. His portrait was based on this image, taken during the celebrations for her inauguration in 1980.

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Beatrix wore the tiara throughout her reign. Above, she chose it for a formal dinner with the Governor-General of Australia at Palace Noordeinde in The Hague in September 2006. The Dutch royal ladies often pair the tiara with this lovely diamond scroll brooch, which belonged to Queen Wilhelmina.

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The tiara also has another setting: the center diamond of each rosette can be swapped out for a ruby. Princess Laurentien wore the tiara with a ruby in the center of the largest rosette at the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden in June 2010.

ROBIN VAN LONKHUIJSEN/AFP/Getty Images

Laurentien has also worn the all-diamond version of the tiara; here, she sports it during the state visit from Belgium in November 2016.

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Queen Maxima has also embraced the tiara, including an ultra-glam appearance in the all-diamond version during a visit to New Zealand in November 2016. (You can read our post on that event here!)

The Belgian Scroll Tiara

02.17.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

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The Belgian Scroll Tiara is one of the loveliest jewels in Luxembourg’s vaults, but it narrowly escaped the auction block only a few years ago.

When Princess Joséphine-Charlotte of Belgium married Hereditary Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg in 1953, she brought a considerable number of jewels with her to her new country, including several wedding gifts. Joséphine-Charlotte chose to wear this new tiara, which was among that collection, in some of her wedding portraits. (For the wedding ceremony, she wore the Congo Necklace Tiara.)

In the image above, Joséphine-Charlotte wears the tiara during a visit to the Vatican. The tiara, which is made of diamonds set in platinum, was made by Henry Coosemans in the same year that Joséphine-Charlotte married. The diamonds were all sourced from the Belgian Congo, which had not yet been granted independence; the same is true for some of the other diamond gifts that Joséphine-Charlotte received. The tiara was given to the princess by the Société Générale, a French bank. The largest central diamond is detachable and can also be worn as a ring.

Joséphine-Charlotte’s husband became Grand Duke Jean when her mother-in-law, Charlotte, abdicated in 1964. Joséphine-Charlotte wore the tiara during part of the abdication ceremonies, as you can see in the (fuzzy) moving image above. (Charlotte wore the enormous Empire Tiara for the occasion.)

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Joséphine-Charlotte also wore the tiara when she and Jean hosted the British royals for a glittering state visit in 1976. Indeed, she continued to wear this tiara almost exclusively until her death in 2005, although she did lend it to one of her daughters-in-law, Princess Sibilla, on more than one occasion.

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After Joséphine-Charlotte died, the tiara almost left the family for good. Her children planned to sell a good deal of the late grand duchess’s jewelry collection, including this tiara. However, public outcry led to the cancellation of the sale, and this tiara was kept in the family’s vaults. (Sadly, other pieces did end up on the auction block eventually.) Today, Maria Teresa wears the tiara occasionally, especially during state visits. Above, she wears the tiara during a state visit to Norway in 2011.

HAAKON MOSVOLD LARSEN/AFP/Getty Images

One of her most recent appearances in the tiara also came in Norway, during the celebrations for King Harald and Queen Sonja’s 80th birthdays in May 2017.

Note: This is an updated version of an earlier post, with new text and images.