Editor’s Note
This article details the recent auction of a historic pink diamond ring at Christie’s, highlighting its rarity and the significant price it commanded.
A rare pink diamond weighing over 10 carats was sold at Christie’s “The Magnificent Jewels” auction held on June 17.
Lot number 44, which sold for $13.98 million (approximately 2.03 billion yen), was a diamond and blackened platinum ring featuring an intricately cut 10.38-carat purplish-pink kite-shaped diamond.
The stone, likely from the legendary Golconda mines and traceable to the 18th century, is linked to the collection of Marie-Thérèse de Angoulême, the only surviving child and eldest daughter of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.
Antoinette, a great jewelry enthusiast, famously entrusted her jewels to her hairdresser while preparing to flee Paris in 1791. She never saw those jewels again. They were eventually passed to Marie-Thérèse. Could this pink diamond have been among them?
A more credible explanation exists: the diamond was gifted to Marie-Thérèse sometime in the 1820s by her uncle, Louis XVIII, who became King of France after Napoleon’s defeat in 1815. Accustomed to wearing precious royal jewels, Marie-Thérèse pleaded with Louis XVIII to let her keep some. Denied because they were state property, the generous king instead purchased 200 diamonds to replace those in her favorite tiara. An invoice from this time (held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris) lists a 10.24-carat diamond, which experts believe is this pink diamond.
Having no children, Marie-Thérèse’s jewels were divided among her nieces and nephews. The tiara was given to the Duke of Chambord and later inherited by his wife, the Duchess Marie-Thérèse, who eventually dismantled it and gifted the stones to her niece, the future Queen Marie Therese of Bavaria. Passed down through subsequent generations, the diamond finally reached an anonymous buyer in 1996, who commissioned JAR to set it into its current design—a fleur-de-lis motif crafted from diamond and smoked platinum.
Some jewelry experts question whether the fleur-de-lis setting is a bit too fitting, considering the stone’s centuries-long Bourbon provenance, but it’s hard to blame them.
