Don’t Miss a Single Sparkling Moment! Sign up for The Court Jeweller Newsletter

The Court Jeweller

Sparkling Royal Jewels From Around the World

Review: Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration

by // Leave a Comment

Caroline de Guitaut’s Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration (2012) [1]
Without many of the wonderful books published over the years on royal jewelry, this blog wouldn’t be able to exist. I get lots of questions from readers about which books I recommend for their growing collections, so I thought I’d do one better and review some of the major books here at The Court Jeweller. We’re kicking off this series with one of the books that came out to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II — Caroline de Guitaut’s Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration.

First off, the specs. This book is deceptively small, but it includes 120 pages of information about the diamonds in the British royal collection, along with detailed photographs of selected pieces. Caroline de Guitaut, the book’s author, is the Curator of Decorative Arts for the Royal Collection. The book itself was published by the Royal Collection Trust as a “souvenir album” and companion to the summer 2012 exhibition of the queen’s diamonds at Buckingham Palace. It’s not the big, comprehensive book to come out of the Diamond Jubilee — that would be Hugh Roberts’s excellent The Queen’s Diamonds. But this one is considerably lighter, smaller, and less expensive. If you’re new to the world of British royal jewels, I would start here rather than splashing out the money for Roberts’s book. If you like this one, the bigger one will definitely also be your cup of tea. If you’ve already got the Roberts book, though, I’m not sure you need this one, too.
Queen Elizabeth II [2]
The book features approximately twenty of the most significant and historical diamond pieces currently in the Royal Collection, including crowns, tiaras, necklaces, earrings, brooches, and bracelets. A significant amount of space is devoted to the Cullinan Diamond in its various forms and mountings. There are pieces here from the Greville inheritance, from the Delhi Durbar suite, and from Queen Victoria’s coronation jewels. Two pieces have been selected (the South African diamonds and the Williamson brooch) from among the current queen’s personal jewels. And some of the big diamond tiaras are represented, too: Queen Alexandra’s Russian Kokoshnik, the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Delhi Durbar. Photographs of individual pieces are interspersed with portraits of royal women actually wearing the diamonds.
But rather unusually for books on royal jewels, Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration also discusses a few other bejeweled items, including some pieces that would have belonged to male royals. I like this inclusion — jeweled objects are so often overlooked when royal collections are considered, but each of these four pieces (Queen Alexandra’s coronation fan, the Jaipur sword, Frederick the Great’s snuff box, and George IV’s sword) is given the same treatment as the wearable objects, including close-up photographs and provenance information.
Along with the individual entries, de Guitaut also provides a history of diamonds in the royal family’s possession and a helpful glossary of jewel terminology. All in all, while this book is nowhere close to covering the breadth of the diamonds in the royal collection, it’s a carefully and deliberately curated look at some of the most significant pieces owned by the Windsors. For those of us who weren’t lucky enough to visit Buckingham Palace and see the Diamond Jubilee exhibit in person, this little souvenir volume is also our chance to experience a bit of the glitter in our own homes.

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Image of book cover from Amazon.com.

2. Detail of photograph of Elizabeth II, available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.

Margaret of Connaught’s Khedive Tiara

by // Leave a Comment

Crown Princess Margareta, ca. 1908 [1]
Margaret of Connaught had a number of tiaras at her disposal during her tenure as crown princess of Sweden, but none of the others are quite as romantic and sentimental as today’s piece: the Cartier tiara given to her as a wedding gift by the Khedive of Egypt.
Margaret of Connaught [2]

The Khedive tiara’s story begins even before the piece’s creation. Margaret, the niece of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, was on a royal tour with her parents, who wanted to marry their daughters off to suitable royal spouses. They had their eye on the future king of Sweden, Gustaf VI Adolf, as a prospective partner for Margaret’s sister, Princess Patricia. They rendezvous-ed with Gustaf Adolf in Cairo, where he immediately fell in love — but with the wrong sister. It didn’t matter, in the end; Margaret was in love with him, too. Gustaf Adolf proposed to her during a dinner at the British consulate in Cairo, and the two were married at Windsor in 1905.

As the young couple had met in his country, it was important that the Khedive of Egypt — the governor of the country, which was ruled by the British at the time — give them a suitable wedding present. He commissioned Cartier to make this tiara for the occasion. The piece, which has alternately been described as a scroll tiara and as a tiara featuring marguerite motifs, bears considerable similarity to another piece made for the Egyptians at roughly the same time: Princess Shwikar’s tiara. That piece has never been firmly attributed to Cartier, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the same jeweler was behind both sparklers.

Margaret wore the piece during her time as Sweden’s crown princess, both as a tiara and as a dress ornament. You can see her wearing the Khedive on the bodice of her dress in the portrait shown at left above (where she wears the diamond tiara given to her by her parents as a diadem). The way that Margaret has positioned the piece in the portrait fits with its depiction in the illustrated guide to her wedding gifts (see below). When worn as a tiara, the piece is flipped so that the scroll elements are at the base.

Illustration of the tiara/ornament from Margaret of Connaught’s wedding gifts [3]
Unfortunately, Margaret had little time to experiment with her tiara collection. When she died in 1920, this tiara was one of the jewels that was inherited by her only daughter, Princess Ingrid. She brought the tiara with her to Denmark when she married Crown Prince Frederik (later Frederik IX) in 1935. Ingrid didn’t wear this piece on her wedding day [4], but it was through her influence that it has become the official wedding tiara for all of her female descendants in the years since.

Ingrid of Denmark [5]

So far, the bridal wearers of the Khedive have been Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (see here); Princess Benedikte of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg (see here); Benedikte’s two daughters, Princess Alexandra (here) and Princess Nathalie (here); Queen Anne-Marie of Greece (see here); and her elder daughter, Princess Alexia (here). Anne-Marie’s younger daughter, Princess Theodora, will also be eligible to wear the tiara if she marries. After Ingrid’s death in 2000, she left the tiara to her younger daughter, Anne-Marie, the former queen of Greece. Anne-Marie has had alterations made to the base of the piece [6], so that it sits much higher now on the wearer’s head (you can clearly see these changes in wedding photos of Nathalie of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, the only bride to have worn it so far after it was altered).

It will be extremely interesting to see what happens to the Khedive tiara in the next generation. Will Anne-Marie leave it to one of her daughters, who are no longer princesses of a reigning monarchy? Will it be returned to the Danes, to preserve it officially as a wedding tiara for the next generation of royal brides? (That will include three Danish princesses — Isabella, Josephine, and Athena — as well as the granddaughters of Benedikte and Anne-Marie.) Cases like the Khedive, which has both historical and familial importance, make me wish that Ingrid had followed the example of Juliana of the Netherlands and set up a foundation for her jewelry. But for now, only time will tell [7].

NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Cropped version of photograph in the public domain; source here. (The Grand Ladies website suggests that the photograph may have been made to advertise Margaret to potential grooms, but if the photo really was taken in 1908, that’s not possible.)
2. Portrait of Crown Princess Margareta of Sweden by Axel Jungstedt, ca. 1909; source here.
3. Detail of the illustrated newspaper guide to Margaret’s wedding gifts; a full version of the image available here.
4. Here’s an image of Frederik and Ingrid on their wedding day in 1935. While neither Margaret nor Ingrid wore the Khedive as a bridal tiara, they both wore the same Irish lace veil that Margaret had been given as a wedding gift. All of Ingrid’s female descendants, plus Crown Princess Mary, have also worn the veil on their wedding days. In a bit of morbid trivia, the same veil covered Margaret of Connaught’s body in her coffin, though the veil was removed before the coffin was closed so that it could be given to Ingrid.
5. Cropped version of photograph available via Wikimedia Commons; source here.
6. See the tiara’s new base here.
7. A version of this post originally appeared at A Tiara a Day in February 2013.

Jewel History: Royal Wedding Gifts (1878)

by // Leave a Comment

King Alfonso XII of Spain and Mercedes d’Orléans[1]
“Royal Wedding Gifts”
(originally appeared in the New York Times on 21 Jan 1878)

The King of Spain [2] has presented to his young bride, the Infanta Mercedes [3], an elegant casket manufactured in Paris. It is of lapis lazuli mounted on four lions’ paws for feet; is 10 inches high and 20 long. The sides are ornamented with a profusion of wreaths of roses in gold and of all colors, and of marvelous workmanship. The key itself is a masterpiece of jewelry, and has the form of a full-blown rose with a bud. The interior is set with diamond studs. This box is destined to preserve the letters of the young couple before their marriage, but in the mean time it will contain a gift of a splendid necklace of eight rows of Indian pearls from the royal bridegroom.

The presents offered by the French government to the King of Spain, on the occasion of his marriage, have just been sent off. They consist of two Sèvres vases, 48 inches in height, and a centre-piece of the same manufacture. The ground-work is of light blue, and the sides are ornamented with paintings in oval. Some Gobelins tapestry [4] is comprised in the gifts, intended to adorn the oratory of the Queen, the subjects being “The Last Supper,” by Leonardo da Vinci, and “The Assumption,” by Murillo.

Note: Mercedes did not have long to enjoy her wedding gifts. She died of typhoid fever on 26 June 1878, only a few months after her wedding (and only two days after her eighteenth birthday). Alfonso subsequently married Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria; he named their eldest daughter Mercedes in honor of his late first wife.
NOTES, PHOTO CREDITS, AND LINKS
1. Detail of German picture postcard of Alfonso XII and Mercedes d’Orléans , published in 1878 to celebrate their wedding; source here.
2. King Alfonso XII of Spain (1857-1885), who succeeded after his mother, Queen Isabella II, abdicated and a military coup restored the Spanish monarchy.
3. Maria de las Mercedes of Orléans (1860-1878) was the daughter of Antoine, Duke of Montpensier (the youngest son of King Louis-Philippe of the France) and Infanta Luisa Fernanda of Spain. She and her husband were first cousins; their mothers were sisters.
4. The Gobelins Manufactory still produces a small number of tapestries for the French government.