On Monday, Sotheby’s announced the sale of an impressive 18th-century necklace of 500 diamonds from the Golconde mines in India. Composed of three rows of diamonds terminated by two pampilles at each end, this necklace, from a private collection, is estimated at between $1.8 and $2.8 million. In addition to its exceptional quality and rarity, its provenance and the size of the diamonds suggest that they may have been set on the famous Collier de la Reine.
It is thought that the necklace was partly remade from diamonds taken from the famous Collier de la Reine made by the jewelers Charles-Auguste Boëhmer and Paul Bassenge, which had been stolen as the result of a vast swindle organized by the Countess de La Motte-Valois, an affair that exploded into the light of day, directly splashing Marie-Antoinette, who had nothing to do with it at the time. The necklace then disappeared and was sold in pieces across Europe, particularly in London.
Some of the diamonds from this necklace were sold by the Comte de La Motte to an English jeweler, William Gray, in London, who documents the purchase of a large number of these diamonds.
Some of these were then used to create the “Sutherland Diamond Rivière”, a gold and silver necklace made up of twenty large brilliant-cut diamonds, the two largest diamonds weighing around 15 carats.
The Royal Watcher reports that when the then Duchess of Sutherland wore the “Diamond Rivière” to a ball in 1946, Sir Henry Channon wrote in his memoirs: “Clare looked young, wearing Marie Antoinette’s famous diamond necklace, or at least two strings of it. (The rest, according to history, was broken off before the French Revolution, but I believe the Anglesey diamond tassels, which Marjorie Anglesey sometimes wears, are part of it.)”
The necklace will go on a world tour to Hong Kong, New York, Singapore, Taipei and Dubai.
It will then be auctioned at the Royal & Noble Jewels sale on November 11 at the Mandarin Oriental in Geneva.
