Saturday Sparkler

The Countess of Wessex’s Wedding Tiara

01.20.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

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Some royal brides wear historical tiaras, some get new tiaras on their wedding days, and others, like Sophie Rhys-Jones, get a combination of the two. For her 1999 wedding to the Earl of Wessex, Sophie (who celebrates her birthday today) was gifted a new tiara made from antique pieces.

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The palace has never confirmed the provenance of the tiara, other than noting that it came from the private jewelry collection of the Queen, but there’s one prevailing (and convincing) theory about its construction. That theory states that the tiara is composed of four anthemion elements that were originally alternative pieces of Queen Victoria’s Regal Circlet. The circlet was made with a set of detachable fleur-de-lis, Maltese cross, and anthemion elements that could be swapped out and rearranged. One of the anthemions was designed to accommodate one of the greatest diamonds from Victoria’s era: the Koh-i-Noor, which is currently set in the Queen Mother’s Crown.

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Although there is no photo of the Regal Circlet with the anthemions attached, the case for the diadem includes spaces for elements identical in shape and size to those on Sophie’s wedding tiara. The Regal Circlet was stripped of its diamonds in the 1930s, and only its frame remains intact today. (The frame is currently at the Museum of London.) Repurposing the remaining anthemion elements was a clever way of giving Sophie a new tiara that still had echoes of previous royal generations. It’s the royal jewel version of reduce, reuse, recycle.

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Since her wedding day, Sophie has worn the tiara several times, including at many European royal weddings. She and Prince Edward are the queen’s go-to representatives at these events abroad, so this wedding tiara has seen many more weddings since its initial outing. Above, Sophie wears the tiara at the royal wedding in Denmark in 2004.

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She also wore the tiara at the wedding of Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel of Sweden in 2010.

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But since Sophie’s tiara collection has begun to expand, the wedding tiara has slowly been relegated to the back of the vault. One of its last major appearances came during the princely wedding in Monaco in 2011.

The Queen Mother’s Cartier Bracelet Bandeau

01.13.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

The Queen Mother wears her Cartier Bracelet Bandeau

With a royal wedding quickly approaching, I’ve been asked numerous times about possible wedding tiaras for Meghan Markle. I’ve got a whole post on the subject over here, but today, we’re going to take a closer look at one of my favorite long-shot candidates: the Queen Mother’s Cartier Bracelet Bandeau.

A catalogue photograph of the bracelets set on their bandeau frame

I’m calling the tiara a long-shot for a simple reason: it hasn’t been worn in public for almost a century. The piece dates to the time when the Queen Mother was still the newly-married Duchess of York. In the 1920s, the Duke of York (later King George VI) bought his new wife a set of Art Deco bracelets from Cartier. Each of the five bracelets in the set features a different gemstone: one with sapphires, one with emeralds, one with rubies, and two with diamonds. The bandeau is made up of three of those bracelets worn together on a frame.

The Queen Mother wears the bandeau

The Queen Mum wore the tiara a few times in public, during the ’20s and ’30s era when the bandeau was uber-fashionable. She had a number of bandeau-style tiaras, including the Lotus Flower (now worn on a traditional frame by the Duchess of Cambridge), the Strathmore Rose (which was photographed in 2012, but hasn’t been worn for nearly as long as the bracelet bandeau) and the rarely-seen double-row meander (worn most recently by Princess Anne).

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The tiara may not have been worn in decades, but the bracelets now belong to the Queen, and she’s worn them occasionally over the years, stacking them in different configurations. She’s been wearing them since long before the Queen Mother’s death, so they may have been either loaned or given to her by her mother during her lifetime. Above, the Queen wears both of the diamond bracelets in Tuvalu in October 1982.

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You can see a very clear image of all five of the bracelets in an excellent book on the Queen’s wardrobe and jewelry, Angela Kelly’s Dressing the Queen. I’m hoping with fingers crossed that the original bandeau frame for the bracelets also still exists in the royal vaults. The sleek, modern profile of the bracelets would look beautiful on Meghan, who so far has favored minimalistic, unfussy jewelry. Plus, if Meghan wore the diamond-sapphire-diamond bracelet combo, it would also give her a little “something blue” in sparkling form for her wedding day!

The Brunswick Tiara

01.06.2018 by The Court Jeweller // Leave a Comment

Victoria Louise wears the Brunswick Tiara (Grand Ladies Site)

Today’s sparkler, the Brunswick Tiara, is an all-diamond diadem from the collection of the former royal family of Hanover. But although we know who currently owns the tiara, there are major questions about who its original — possibly famous — owner might have been.

Empress Josephine, ca. 1812 (Grand Ladies Site)

Many tiaras have been tied, both correctly and incorrectly, to Napoléon’s first empress, Joséphine de Beauharnais. (You can read about many of them here.) The Brunswick Tiara is one of those pieces, but proving that it really belonged to Joséphine is challenging. One particularly important piece of evidence may exist: a portrait. On her website, Ursula argues that the portrait shows Joséphine wearing the Brunswick Tiara.

Unfortunately, the website doesn’t include an image of said portrait itself; instead, two portraits by Robert Lefèvre featuring Joséphine wearing another similarly-shaped diadem are included. (Ursula also cites a document from the National Archives in France that purportedly lists the cost of the tiara.) It’s certainly possible that the portrait in question does show the tiara, but even if we could scrutinize it, using a painting to conclusively prove that Joséphine owned the piece is tough. The combination of possible artistic license and later changes to the tiara would ultimately make it challenging (though not impossible) to come to a solid conclusion about the tiara’s roots.

A closer view of the tiara’s design (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The design of the tiara does resemble pieces made during Joséphine’s lifetime. The tiara uses many of the motifs favored by the French court during the empire era, including the laurels that drape across the top of the tiara and the delicate geometric scrolls across the central part of the piece. Precisely how Joséphine’s tiara is supposed to have traveled from France to Germany is unclear, although members of her family did marry into various German royal families. The most we can say, I think, is that maybe Joséphine owned the tiara (and maybe she didn’t).

Victoria Louise and Ernst August III (Grand Ladies Site)

By 1913, the tiara had made its way into the possession of Moritz Elimeyer, the Saxon court jeweler. The tiara was not in pristine condition; predictably, some of the larger diamonds were missing from the piece. But the damaged diadem was exactly what Adolf Hartwieg, a Brunswick state official, was looking for. He had been tasked with finding a suitable wedding present that could be given to Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, the daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, to celebrate her marriage to Prince Ernst August III of Hanover, the future Duke of Brunswick. The tiara, though in need of repairs, fit the bill.

Victoria Louise wears the tiara (Grand Ladies Site)

The tiara was refurbished by the Brunswick court jeweler, Hermann Jürgens, and given to the princess on the day before her wedding. Victoria Louise was apparently delighted with the gift, and she wore the tiara both as a young woman and in her old age, long after the monarchy had been abolished in Germany. On her death in 1980, the tiara stayed in the family, and today is owned by her grandson, Prince Ernst August V. (Another of Victoria Louise’s tiaras, the Prussian Tiara, passed through her daughter’s descendants and now is in the collection of the Spanish royal family.)

Caroline wears the tiara (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Unseen for many years, it was feared by some that the Brunswick tiara had been sold by Ernst August. But in 2004, his second wife, Princess Caroline of Monaco, unexpectedly turned up at the Danish crown princely wedding wearing the tiara. So far, this is the only time that Caroline has been seen in the tiara, and it seems highly unlikely that we’ll find her wearing it again, as she and her husband have lived apart for some time.

Ekaterina (in the family’s floral tiara) and Ernst August Jr. on their wedding day (RONNY HARTMANN/AFP/Getty Images)

A more likely future wearer, I think, is Ekaterina, the new wife of Prince Ernst August V’s eldest son — who, like every other eldest son in the line, is also named Prince Ernst August. Ekaterina wore the family’s magnificent diamond floral tiara for her wedding last summer and carried it well. The Hanoverians are sometimes invited to various royal events, and here’s hoping that Ekaterina will bring out the Brunswick for one of those sometime in the future!