Unseen for a Century: Catherine the Great’s Diamonds and an Imperial Fabergé Necklace Return to Sotheby’s

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The most exacting record of Romanov splendour was not compiled by the court that amassed it, but by the government that set out to dismantle it. Over the course of nearly four months in 1922, a small team working under the mineralogist Alexander Fersman catalogued and photographed the seized Imperial treasure, producing between 1925 and 1926 the definitive illustrated inventory of the Russian crown jewels.

Four of the pieces documented in those pages then slipped out of public sight for almost a hundred years. On 17 June, they resurface in New York, at the inaugural session of Artistic Luxury: Fabergé, Gold Boxes, Silver & Ceramics — among them three diamond flowers once worn against the silk of Catherine the Great’s gowns, and an Imperial Fabergé necklace whose history reads like a diplomatic dispatch.

A Court to Rival Versailles

Catherine II ruled from 1762 to 1796 with an instinct for spectacle that bordered on policy. Diamonds, in her hands, were instruments of statecraft as much as adornment, a language of authority legible across every court in Europe. She was responsible for the single largest expansion of the Imperial jewellery collection, and she gathered her finest stones into a chamber contemporaries called the Brilliant Room — a former bedchamber in the Winter Palace converted to house her diamonds, its regalia laid out beneath a great crystal globe and its walls lined with cabinets of treasure.

Among the most intimate objects in that collection were the small ribbon-tied flowers set with old-cut diamonds and mounted in silver, worn not as jewellery in the modern sense but stitched directly onto the fabric of the Imperial gown. The convention of the period explains the material: diamonds were set in silver to preserve their whiteness, the metal often backed in gold to spare the skin and the cloth. Sewn across a bodice, these trimmings scattered light with every movement, producing what observers of the day described as a mesmerising glitter.

Three such flowers come to sale, all attributed to Louis David Duval of Geneva, one of Catherine’s principal suppliers. A pair carries an estimate of $60,000–80,000; two further single examples are estimated at $30,000–50,000 and $40,000–60,000 respectively.

For the collector, the figures are almost modest against the rarity of what they represent: intact eighteenth-century court ornaments survive in private hands only exceptionally, since most were broken up and reset as fashion turned. These were not, and later generations of Romanov empresses — both Maria Feodorovna and Alexandra Feodorovna — are recorded wearing them in surviving photographs.

Wheat and Cornflowers

The fourth and arguably most distinctive jewel predates Catherine entirely. It belonged to her predecessor, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna (r. 1741–1762), and is conceived on a larger scale: a spray of wheat and cornflowers set with diamonds and Ceylon sapphires, mounted over gold foil (estimate $40,000–60,000).

The foiling is the telling detail. Eighteenth-century jewellers routinely set coloured stones in closed, foil-backed mounts, the thin metallic leaf placed behind each sapphire to deepen and direct its blue — a technique abandoned once stone quality and cutting advanced enough to let gems speak for themselves. Elizabeth’s reign was celebrated for drawing remarkable beauty from comparatively modest means, and this jewel, the most charming of the four, is a fine testament to that art.

Nine Boxes in Moscow

The thread that binds these four pieces is the manner of their survival. Following the Revolution of 1917, the crown jewels were removed from the Winter Palace to the Armoury Hall of the Moscow Kremlin, where they were stored in nine great boxes. In 1922 they were brought out to be catalogued on behalf of the new state, which intended to convert them into capital for an economy in ruins. Fersman’s committee — which, by a quiet irony, included expert jewellers among them a member of the Fabergé firm — worked for months to document and photograph the collection, and the resulting publication, Russia’s Treasure of Diamonds and Precious Stones, remains the single most authoritative inventory of the Imperial jewels. All four pieces in this sale appear in its plates.

The state’s resolve to keep the treasure intact did not last. In 1927 a selection was sent to London and sold at Christie’s; these jewels later passed through S.J. Phillips, where the present owner’s family acquired them, and there they remained, unseen, for the better part of a century. For a collector, that lineage carries a particular weight: documentation in the Fersman catalogue functions as something close to ironclad provenance, anchoring each flower to a named royal collection and a published record at a moment when so much else was dispersed beyond tracing.

Subtlety Over Spectacle

If the diamond flowers speak of the eighteenth century, the sale’s commanding lot belongs to the twilight of the dynasty. A rare Imperial Fabergé diamond and aquamarine necklace, dating to the reign of Nicholas II, carries an estimate of $400,000–600,000 and a provenance drawn directly from the diplomatic record.

In May 1911 the Imperial Cabinet proposed it as a gift for the state visit of the German Crown Prince Wilhelm and Crown Princess Cecilie to St Petersburg — a visit that coincided with the Emperor’s forty-third birthday, after which the couple travelled on to represent Germany at the coronation of George V. Cecilie, a second cousin of Nicholas II through her Russian mother, had deep ties to the Imperial court; the necklace was offered to her at a cost of 2,650 roubles.

It was made by Albert Holmström, who had succeeded his father August as Fabergé’s head jeweller and whose hand lies behind some of the firm’s most important commissions — including the diamond kokoshnik tiara, also linked to Cecilie, that sold at Sotheby’s Geneva in May 2019. The necklace distils the Fabergé creed that a jewel should flatter its wearer through restraint rather than mass.

Luminous Siberian aquamarines, long prized for the clarity and cool blue of stones from the Russian mines, sit within surrounds of rose-cut diamonds and the diamond-set laurels the house so often favoured. Even the engineering serves the effect: a deep gallery beneath each aquamarine lifts the stone clear of the neck, allowing light to enter and return from below. Necklaces of this calibre are exceptionally rare, much of the firm’s fine jewellery having been confiscated and broken up after the Revolution — and this one survives with its original fitted Fabergé case, over sixteen inches long and among the largest known.

958 Rose-Cut Diamonds

The necklace carries one further distinction. Two of Albert Holmström’s St Petersburg design books survived the upheaval, recording in watercolour every jewel made between March 1909 and March 1915, each entry annotated with materials, stone counts and exact weights. The page for this necklace, radiating from a central aquamarine, specifies eleven round-cut aquamarines, eleven brilliants and 958 rose-cut diamonds — a degree of documentation that turns a beautiful object into a fully witnessed one, the design drawing now held by Wartski in London standing as its paper twin.

The Wider Sale

Around these headline lots, the inaugural Artistic Luxury sale assembles two centuries of goldsmithing. A gold, silver-gilt and guilloché enamel Fabergé desk clock of circa 1898, once belonging to Empress Marie Feodorovna, mother of Nicholas II, is estimated at $70,000–90,000, while a group of gold boxes from the collection of the American philanthropist Ailsa Mellon Bruce brings a distinguished transatlantic provenance to the room.

Taken together, the sale frames a century of dispersal as a single narrative — and offers, in four small diamond flowers and one aquamarine necklace, the rare chance to acquire objects that outlasted the court, the empire, and the regime that meant to sell them.