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Anonymous asked:
hello, love your work! any idea what tiara the lady (rose kennedy? mrs joseph?) in the first and second photo is wearing? members2(.)boardhost(.)com/royal-jewels/msg/1486437742(.)html thank you!
tiaramania answered:
That tiara has been a mystery for years but in January, Vincent Meylan discovered new information about it which is very exciting. I’m sorry, this is going to be very long.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Van Cleef & Arpels had a tiara that they called Empress Josephine’s Coronation Tiara. Jacques Arpels said that the tiara had been inherited Queen Hortense and then by Napoleon III and sold by Empress Eugenie while in exile in 1872. It then somehow came to be owned by a wealthy family friend who he bought it from. See Empress Josephine’s tiara in The Coronation of Napoleon here.
Several royal jewel historians disagreed with the theory that it belonged to Empress Josephine. Bernard Morel wrote in his book about the French Crown Jewels and translated by Arthur from RJWMB,
Van Cleef & Arpels owns a 1040-diamond tiara mounted on yellow gold, and totaling 260 carats, which is reputed to have belonged to Empress Josephine and which was displayed at the Grand Palais from June to December 1969 at the exhibition “Napoleon”. This tiara would have been presented by Napoleon to the Empress, who would have bequeathed it to her daughter Queen Hortense. It would then have gone by inheritance to Napoleon III and would have been sold in London in 1872 by Empress Eugenie at the beginning of her exile.
Yet it is certain that this tiara did not exist in the inventory [of Josephine’s private jewels] made in 1804, nor in the one made in 1814, in which the only diamond tiara was partly dismantled and included briolettes, which is not the case of this tiara. It can not either be the diamond tiara delivered by [Crown jeweller] Nitot in 1807, which was made of 2882 diamonds. Of course, it could have been acquired and given away by the Empress between 1804 and 1814, but despite all our researches we could not find any proof of this supposal, nor any proof of the sale of this tiara by Empress Eugenie in 1872. Besides, Mr Serge Grandjean, head curator of the department of artifacts of the Louvre Museum, told us his doubts about the attribution of this tiara to Josephine: his doubts were based on the shape of the frontal part of the tiara, with a downward spike which looked to him incompatible with the style of the Napoleonic time, opinion which I fully share.
According to Meylan, the tiara is made of two parts with the diamonds set using different techniques. The scroll elements were made in the early 1800s but the central and bottom portions were made later by “a jeweller who was not very talented” probably trying to fill in the missing pieces of an older tiara. He believes that the older portions of the tiara might be the partly dismantled diamond tiara from Empress Josephine’s 1814 jewel inventory and he found a description of a similar tiara with missing parts in the 1872 auction of Empress Eugenie’s jewels. Meylan discovered the first known appearance of the tiara in it’s current form in Angela Burdett-Coutts, Baroness Burdett-Countess’s jewel inventory which included a picture of the tiara. After her death in 1906, it was sold to Violet Mond, Baroness Melchett, who in turn sold it to Van Cleef & Arpels sometime before her death in 1945.
Van Cleef & Arpels used the tiara in advertising campaigns and lent it out to many women over the years including Maria von Leuchtenberg de Pasquale, Jill Corey, Nancy Berg, Rose Kennedy, Jane Anderson Dudley, Princess Grace of Monaco, and Princess Isabella of Orleans-Braganza, Countess of Paris. They’ve since sold the tiara but I don’t know who currently owns it. There is also another similar tiara (here) that this one is often confused with that I also don’t know anything about.
TLDR: Parts of the tiara may have belonged to Empress Josephine but not in the form it is in now and even if it belonged to her it probably wasn’t her coronation tiara.
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