Footnotes

Provenance:
Christie's London, 17th April 2000, lot 132;
The Twinight Collection

Louise Bathilde Girard was a Parisian painter based on the Rue Condé, she took part in the Salon de Paris for the first time in 1824 with three paintings after Gérard and after that took part in the Salons regularly until 1848. She was the wife of the engraver François Girard. (see: W. Neuwirth, Porzellanmaler-Lexicon, 1740-1914, p. 304).

The eldest child of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France, Princess Marie-Thérèse Charlotte (1178-1851) was born at Versailles. She was the ill-fated monarch's only child to reach adulthood. In 1799, she married her cousin, Louis Antoine, Duc d'Angoulême, the eldest son of Charles, Count of Artois, henceforth becoming the Duchesse d'Angoulême. She became the Dauphine of France upon the accession of her uncle and father-in-law, Charles X, to the French throne in 1824. She was herself briefly but unofficially Queen of France for all of twenty minutes, on 2nd August 1830 - between the time of her father-in-law signing his abdication and her husband, reluctantly, signing the same document, although this claim is often disputed.

The diamond parure seen in the present lot was assembled for the Duchess in 1814. Upon the return of Louis XVIII after the Hundred Days of 1815, part of the diamond parure was returned to the Crown. The full parure consisted of the diadem, necklace and pendent earrings, all seen in the present portrait, a pair of bracelets, a comb, a bandeau and a belt-clasp. The necklace and earrings were retained by the Duchess together with the pair of matching bracelets because these jewels all belonged specifically to her. The remaining diadem, comb, bandeau and belt clasp were returned to the Crown via the Parisian jeweller, Gibert, with whom the Duchess had left them. The stones from the bandeau were later broken up for use in other jewels.

In 1824, the Duchess naturally expressed her desire to keep the diadem as part of her personal collection of jewellery. This magnificent jewel can be seen with the matching necklace and pendent earrings in the Duchesse d'Angoulême's oil portrait of 1816 by Antoine-Jean Gros (French, 1771-1835), which forms part of the Louvre Collection at Versailles (inventory number. 5079). Louis XVIII had instructed that no further items were to be removed from the Crown Collection. He therefore agreed to buy new diamonds for the diadem. Papers from the Crown jeweller, Bapst, that are held by the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris include a document from the Ministry of the King's Household, dated 4th May 1824 and described as a "budget of 200,000 francs......to secure the return to the Crown Jewel House of the diamonds mounted on the diadem belonging to the Duchesse d'Angouleme, and to supply H.R.H. with a new diadem of a value equal to that of the first". The total value of the diamonds acquired by Bapst to replace the original stones from the diadem was recorded as 333,962 francs with the largest diamond exceeding 13.00 carats (see Morel, B. The French Crown Jewels, 1988, p.303, on which an engraving of the present lot is also illustrated).

Although the diamond diadem of 1814 tragically no longer exists in its original form, the original stones it consisted of were returned to the French Crown for mounting in different jewels and a new diamond diadem was constructed for the Duchess. The majority of the French Crown jewels were later sold in the Pavilion de Flore at the Louvre on 12th-23rd May 1887 by the Third Republic. The sale attracted worldwide attention from some of the wealthiest personalities of the Gilded Age and the greatest jewellery houses of the day including Bapst, Fabergé, Tiffany and Van Cleef & Arpels. Many of these jewels were deconstructed and broken up - a huge loss to the jewellery world - while others have remained intact and majestically resurface from time to time at auction.