Princely Pearls

The brooch was a wedding gift from Prince Albert von Thurn und Taxis to his bride Archduchess Margarethe of Austria. The Archduchess also received from Prince Albert, on the same occasion, the fabulous pearl and diamond tiara which Gabriel Lemonnier created in 1853 for the wedding of Eugénie de Guzmán, Comtesse de Teba to Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.

The pearls used by Lemonnier to create the tiara, came from the French Treasury and were believed erroneously, at the time, to have belonged to Queen Marie Antoinette, another Austrian Archduchess – which led Prince Albert to consider the tiara very appropriate for his bride. Prince Albert purchased the tiara from the jeweller Julius Jacobi who had acquired it at the auction of the French Crown Jewels in Paris in 1887.

The brooch is unsigned but bears French gold marks and may well be the work of Gabriel Lemonnier or François Kramer who, in 1853, also created pearl and diamond brooches for Empress Eugénie.

In the portrait photograph above, dated 1899, the Archduchess can be seen wearing both jewels, the Lemonnier tiara (now on permanent exhibition in the Louvre Museum in Paris) and this imposing brooch. In fact, both these jewels were included in the same auction at Sotheby’s in Geneva in 1992 and so we had the rare opportunity of examining and comparing them both in detail.

This image also shows how important pearls were to confirm and demonstrate status at the turn of the century. Certainly, we find the three huge pearls at the centre of the brooch to be unforgettable and they are among the finest we have ever seen, not only in terms of colour but also in terms of lustre.

In 1992 natural pearls were not in demand and consequently we had placed a rather modest estimate in the catalogue. Nevertheless, the pre-sale catalogue estimate of CHF200,000-300,000 was comfortably exceeded by the achieved price of CHF517,000. In our opinion, however, this brooch could well sell for twenty times more than this in the current market, natural pearls having regained their former appeal and status as the ‘queen of gems’.