JCKstyle - October 5, 2007
When it comes to European royalty, the likes of Princess Diana or Princess Stephanie are only the most recent chapters in a long history of daring style and scandalous behavior. Marie Antoinette set the bar for young, beautiful royals and, like any good style maven, even when facing the guillotine, she ensured that her pearls survived intact. Those storied and beautiful natural pearls are, for the first time ever, on the auction block. Christie's in London will sell a mid-19th-century necklace set with her pearls on Dec. 12, for an estimated $800,000. For more than 200 years, they have been in the family to which Antoinette entrusted them before her beheading.
When the doomed queen was captured during the French Revolution, she gave a bag with her pearls and diamonds to friend and confidant Lady Sutherland, Elizabeth Leveson-Gower, who, as wife of the British ambassador, had diplomatic immunity and could escape with the jewels. The gems were to be returned to Antoinette upon her own escape. When she was instead executed, the Leveson-Gower family held on to the pearls, finally having them set in 1849 into the necklace being auctioned, crafted at the time as a gift to the bride of Lady Sutherland's grandson.
The necklace, with a fringe of 21 graduated drop-shape gray natural pearls suspended from an old-cut diamond ribbon intertwining a ruby collar featuring 12 button-shape gray natural pearls, is a stunning piece one could easily lose her head over.
Weekly Gem
In other auction news, Sotheby's has its own bragging rights this fall, as it sells in November a brilliant-cut D/Flawless diamond weighing in at a whopping 84.37 cts. (the largest brilliant, top-quality stone ever to appear at auction). The expected price for this little bauble? Somewhere between $12 million and $16 million.
