A mysterious diamond-laden necklace with attainable hyperlinks to a scandal that contributed to the downfall of Marie Antoinette has bought for $4.8m (£3.8m) at an public sale in Geneva.
The 18th-century merchandise of jewelry containing roughly 300 carats of diamonds had been estimated to promote on the Sotheby’s Royal and Noble Jewels sale for $1.8-2.8m.
However after energetic bidding, the hammer value ticked in at 3.55m Swiss francs ($4m), and Sotheby’s listed the ultimate value after taxes and commissions at 4.26m francs ($4.81m).
The unidentified purchaser, who positioned her bid over the telephone, was “ecstatic”, Andres White Correal, chair of the Sotheby’s jewelry division, instructed AFP.
“She was able to combat and she or he did,” he stated, including that it had been “an electrical evening”.
“There’s clearly a distinct segment available in the market for historic jewels with fabulous provenance … Persons are not solely shopping for the article, however they’re shopping for all of the historical past that’s hooked up to it,” he stated.
A number of the diamonds within the piece are believed to stem from the jewel on the centre of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace – a scandal within the 1780s that additional tarnished the repute of France’s final queen, Marie Antoinette, and boosted assist for the approaching French Revolution.
The public sale home stated the necklace, comprised of three rows of diamonds completed with a diamond tassel at every finish, had emerged “miraculously intact” from an Asian non-public assortment to make its first public look in 50 years.
“This spectacular vintage jewel is an unbelievable survivor of historical past,” it stated in a press release previous to the sale.
Describing the Georgian-era piece as “uncommon and extremely essential”, Sotheby’s stated it had most likely been created within the decade previous the French Revolution.
“The jewel has handed from households to households. We will begin on the early twentieth century when it was a part of the gathering of the Marquesses of Anglesey,” White Correal stated.
Members of this aristocratic household are believed to have worn the necklace twice in public: as soon as on the 1937 coronation of King George VI and as soon as at his daughter Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.
Past that, little is thought of the necklace, together with who designed it and for whom it was commissioned, though the public sale home believes that such a powerful vintage jewel might solely have been created for a royal household.
Sotheby’s stated it was seemingly that among the diamonds featured within the piece got here from the well-known necklace concerned within the scandal that engulfed Marie Antoinette only a few years earlier than she was guillotined.
That scandal concerned a hard-up noblewoman named Jeanne de la Motte who pretended to be a confidante of the queen, and managed to amass a lavish diamond-studded necklace in her title, in opposition to a promise of a later fee.
Whereas the queen was later discovered to be innocent within the affair, the scandal nonetheless deepened the notion of her careless extravagance, contributing to the anger that might unleash the revolution.
Sotheby’s stated the diamonds within the necklace bought on Wednesday have been most likely sourced from “the legendary Golconda mines in India”, thought-about to supply the purest and most dazzling diamonds.
“The lucky purchaser has walked away with a spectacular piece of historical past,” Tobias Kormind, head of Europe’s largest on-line diamond jeweller, 77 Diamonds, stated in a press release.
“With distinctive high quality diamonds from the legendary, now extinct Indian Golconda mines, the historical past of a attainable hyperlink to Marie Antoinette, together with the truth that it was worn to 2 coronations, all make this 18th-century necklace really particular.”
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