Hope Diamond

The Hope Diamond is a blue diamond that has been famed for its great size and blue-violet color since the 17th century. It was extracted in the 17th century from the Kollur Mine in Andhra Pradesh, India. The gemstone's exceptional size has revealed new information about the formation of diamonds.

The Hope Diamond's recorded history begins in 1666, when the French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier purchased the raw Golconda stone in India. After cutting the gem and renaming it "the French Blue" (Le bleu de France), Tavernier sold it to King Louis XIV of France in 1668. It was stolen in 1792, re-cut by persons unknown, and recovered after a lapse of years, appearing under the Hope name in an 1839 gem catalogue from the Hope banking family, from whom the diamond's name derives.

The Hope Diamond's last private owner was the American jeweler Harry Winston, who bought it in 1949 from the estate of the mining heiress and socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean. After exhibiting the diamond on tour for several years, Winston set it in a necklace and donated it in 1958 to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., where it remains on permanent exhibition.

Classification

thumb|alt=Picture of a diamond.|The Hope Diamond in 1974

The Hope Diamond is a large, ,

The Hope Diamond was also blamed for the unhappy fates of other historical figures vaguely linked to its ownership, such as the falls of Madame Athenais de Montespan and French finance minister, Nicolas Fouquet, during the reign of Louis XIV; the beheadings of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and the rape and mutilation of the Princesse de Lamballe during the French Revolution; and the forced abdication of Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II who had supposedly killed various members of his court for the stone (despite the annotation in Habib's auction catalog).

| This triggered an investigation by an international team of researchers into the stone's history, which previously had to rely on two-dimensional sketches of the diamond. The three-dimensional structure allowed researchers to apply techniques such as computer-aided drawing analysis.

The methods for digitally-reconstructing the gem are reviewed in this article's "Theft and Disappearance" section. The emblem of the Golden Fleece of Louis XV was reconstructed around the French Blue, including the "Côte de Bretagne" spinel of , the "Bazu" diamond of , 3 oriental topazes (yellow sapphires), five brilliants of up to and nearly 300 smaller diamonds.

As part of the investigation, the "Tavernier Blue" diamond was reconstructed from the original French edition of Tavernier's Voyages (rather than the later London edition, which had distorted and modified Tavernier's original figures). The Smithsonian Institution provided ray-tracing and optical spectroscopic data about the Hope diamond.

The lead cast had been catalogued at the French museum in 1850 and was provided by a prominent Parisian jeweler named Charles Archard who lived during the same generation as René Just Haüy, who died in 1822. Most likely, the lead cast was made near 1815, because that was the year that similar entries from the 1850 catalogue had been made. The model was accompanied by a label stating that the French Blue was in the possession of a person known as "Mr. Hope of London". Other archives at the Muséum suggests that Hope was a customer of Achard for many years, particularly for blue gems.

These findings have helped investigators piece together what may have happened during the rock's anonymous years during the several decades following 1792. According to one line of reasoning, the first "Hope" to have the "Hope Diamond"—Henry Phillip Hope—might have possessed the French Blue that he had acquired some time after the 1792 robbery in Paris, perhaps around 1794–1795, when the Hopes were believed to have left Holland for London to escape Napoleon's armies. This places Mr. Hope and Mr. Guillot in London at the same time. According to a late nineteenth-century historian named Bapts, a contract was made between Cadet Guillot and a French aristocrat named Lancry de la Loyelle, in 1796, to sell the spinel-dragon of the Golden Fleece. According to this line of reasoning, in 1802 Hope sold his assets, and the continental blockade by Napoleon led the Hope's bank into a serious financial crisis by 1808, and the crisis peaked during the winter of 1811–1812 This put Mr. Hope in a financial bind. There is a possibility that, given his financial predicament, Hope pawned the French Blue to jewel merchant Eliason to get much-needed cash when the British currency, sterling, was highly depreciated. This is consistent with the entry in Eliason's records about having the stone in 1812.

However, the diamond's owners may have felt pressure to recut the stone quickly to disguise its identity, since if the French government had learned of its existence, it may have sued the owners for repossession. It led to the construction, using cubic zirconia, of a piece that almost exactly resembles the mythic French Blue masterpiece.

The emblem has another great blue diamond, which was later named "the Bazu" in reference to a dealer who reportedly had sold it to Louis XIV in 1669. This Bazu diamond was recut in 1749 as a baroque cushion weighing . The 1791 inventory mentioned that the Bazu was "light sky blue", which is consistent with the fact that the Golden Fleece of the Color Adornment was made of a variety of great colored gems. Based on documents kept in a private collection, it could be shown that this particular diamond was not hexagonal-shaped, as some historians had previously thought, but was in a shape best described as "rounded squared", similar to the so-called Régent diamond. The box was gilded by Didier Montecot to the arms of Louis XV, using the king's original iron stamp made by the Simier house. A dark red cramoisi ribbon, made of crimson satin moire, holds the jewel inside the box.

File:PlombDBC.jpg|Lead cast of the "French Blue" diamond, discovered in 2007 at the National Museum of Natural History (France) by Farges (ca. ).

File:Diamantbleu.gif|Computer reconstruction of the "French Blue" diamond, as cut by Jean Pitau for Louis XIV in 1673 (ca. ).

File:Presentation.png|The recreated great Golden Fleece of Louis XV, presented by H. Horovitz (left) and (right) at the Hôtel de la Marine, formerly the royal Storehouse in Paris, on June 30, 2010.

File:Toison2010.png|Detailed view of the recreated great Golden Fleece of king Louis XV of France. Below the spinel Côte de Bretagne hangs the French Blue diamond and the fleece itself, set with hundreds of yellow diamond replicas.

Classification

See also

Explanatory notes

References

Further reading

External links