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A queen’s homage to Victoria, an empress’s gift to her husband’s court and a Kashmir sapphire mounted in imperial Vienna lead The Geneva Jewels Auction: VII at Phillips on 9 November 2026.

Of all the jewels gathered for The Geneva Jewels Auction: VII, the one carrying the most royal history is, by its own catalogue description, a reproduction. In 1928 Queen Mary asked the London jewellers Hennell to recreate a necklace she admired, the Golden Jubilee Necklace made by Carrington & Co. for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee of 1887. Her version left the royal household as a gift to her niece, the Duchess of Beaufort, remained with her until 1986, and now returns to auction at Phillips in Geneva as lot 336, estimated at CHF 125,000–180,000. A replica commissioned as a private homage has acquired, in less than a century, the very quality it was made to imitate: a history of its own.

The necklace leads the Collections & Provenance section, which reaches its second edition this season, in a sale that coincides with the 230th anniversary of a house founded in London in 1796 by the auctioneer Harry Phillips. In a statement provided to High Jewellery Dream, Benoît Repellin, Phillips’ Worldwide Head of Jewellery, describes the jewels of the section as “united by their exceptional rarity, distinguished provenance and outstanding craftsmanship”, adding that together they offer “a fascinating insight into the remarkable stories, people and moments that have shaped the history of jewellery”.

Around the Hennell necklace, the catalogue gathers jewels made in the decades before it, a thread that runs through the second half of the nineteenth century: a bracelet that family tradition links to Empress Eugénie and her court, a Viennese brooch set with a sapphire from the first great years of Kashmir, two Boucheron jewels made within a decade of each other, and an olive branch by René Lalique from the years before Art Nouveau made his name. Many of them were reshaped by later owners, and read in sequence they show how the record of those hands comes to weigh as much as the stones they hold.

A Jubilee Necklace, Made Twice

The original belongs to the jewels of the British Crown’s own memory. According to the Phillips catalogue essay, it was made by Carrington & Co. for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of 1887, and Queen Elizabeth II later chose it for her first State Opening of Parliament as monarch, in 1952. A further copy, the essay notes, was made in the 1960s for Princess Alexandra of Kent, which places Queen Mary’s commission within a small family of replicas that the original seems to have inspired.

Queen Mary (1867–1953) brought to this commission the habits for which she is remembered as a collector: she acquired, remodelled and commissioned jewels with close attention to their provenance and to the history of the monarchy, as the catalogue observes. Her necklace follows the design of Victoria’s with deliberate fidelity. Of openwork construction, it is composed of floral and trefoil motifs graduating towards a central quatrefoil, set throughout with circular-cut diamonds and with twenty-one cultured pearls. Where the original was mounted in gold with natural pearls, Hennell worked in platinum and cultured pearls, and the crown motif was omitted. The fitted case is signed Hennell, and the catalogue records that the necklace has been slightly altered from its original design.

The omissions are as revealing as the resemblance. Without the crown, the necklace became a jewel for private rather than ceremonial wear, and it was as a private gift that it left the royal household. Queen Mary gave it to her niece, Mary Cambridge Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort (1897–1987), who kept it until it was sold in 1986, according to the Phillips catalogue. A Hennell receipt dated 28 February 1986, cited in Sotheby’s catalogue when the necklace was offered there in 2004 and confirmed by Phillips in answers provided for this article, records that it was made in London in 1928 for Queen Mary and later given by her to the Beaufort family, who were her hosts during the Second World War. It has since passed through several private collections.

The necklace has also changed shape since it left the Beaufort family. When Sotheby’s offered it in 2004, it was set with seventeen cultured pearls and came with two additional segments of cultured pearls and diamonds and two cultured pearl and diamond drops. According to Phillips, the two segments have since been incorporated into the necklace, two trefoil motifs have been removed and the pearl drops are no longer present, which explains both the twenty-one pearls counted today and the slight alteration recorded in the catalogue. None of these changes touches what gives the necklace its value: cultured pearls and platinum account for little of an estimate that rests almost entirely on a documented chain of ownership running from Victoria’s Jubilee to Queen Mary’s commission and on to the Beaufort family, three generations of royal history set in a single openwork line.

An Empress’s Gift to the Court of Napoleon III

A second line of provenance leads from London to the Second Empire. Lot 332, an emerald, diamond and gold bracelet of the mid-nineteenth century, is described by Phillips as a gift from Empress Eugénie to Françoise Laurence Staouëli de La Rochelambert, daughter of the Marquis de La Rochelambert and wife of Olivier de La Poëze, Chamberlain to Emperor Napoleon III. The attribution rests on family tradition. The Phillips press office explains that there is no written documentation and that the jewel carries no inscription; the bracelet remained in the family until recently, and the house believes it was given shortly after Françoise de La Rochelambert was appointed Lady of the Palace to the Empress in 1855.

The bracelet is a precise document of court taste in those years. Of openwork design, it centres on a step-cut emerald of 5.46 carats between four smaller step-cut emeralds, framed by foliate motifs set with old-cut diamonds and finely engraved scrolling in gold. It bears the French maker’s mark of Labitte Frères, and an SSEF report identifies the central stone as Colombian, with a moderate amount of oil in its fissures.

The degree of oil disclosed in that report bears directly on value, as another emerald in the same sale shows. Later in the catalogue, a late nineteenth-century brooch set with a Colombian emerald of 7.96 carats with no oil (lot 388) carries an estimate of CHF 400,000–600,000, against CHF 38,000–55,000 for the bracelet. The brooch’s emerald is about two and a half carats heavier, yet its estimate is roughly ten times higher, a gap that the absence of clarity enhancement goes a long way towards explaining. In the bracelet, what the collector acquires is a fragment of the Second Empire court as one family remembered it: a gift handed down by tradition, the name of a Lady of the Palace and the work of a Parisian maker, at a fraction of the price commanded by a stone of untouched clarity.

1881: The Landslide That Set a Standard

The most valuable of the nineteenth-century jewels owes its stone to a single geological accident. Kashmir sapphires were discovered in about 1881 in the Pádar district, at an elevation of about 4,600 metres in the Himalaya, apparently after a landslide exposed the host rock, according to the Gemological Institute of America. The mines were worked only until about 1887, when operations declined, and that brief window produced what GIA describes as “what is generally considered to be the finest sapphires ever found”. The Phillips catalogue essay adds that stones reached the markets of Simla in 1882 and that Maharaja Ranbir Singh took control of the mine.

Lot 425 holds one of these stones: a sugarloaf cabochon of 18.69 carats, unheated according to both SSEF and Gübelin, set as a brooch by Rozet & Fischmeister. The Viennese firm, registered in 1860, held the titles of imperial and royal court jewellers and traded from 1873 to 1922 at Kohlmarkt 11, the house “zum goldenen Ringe”, according to the collection records of the MAK, Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts. Like the Hennell necklace, the brooch did not stay as its makers left it. The ribbon at the top and the central motif are later additions and can be detached; Phillips indicates that their date cannot be established and that, under magnification, slight differences in workmanship suggest they may come from a different workshop. At some point, an owner chose to add new ornament to the work of a Viennese court jeweller, and the brooch reaches Geneva carrying both.

The sugarloaf cut accounts for much of the brooch’s character. A high-domed cabochon preserves the weight and depth of the original crystal, and the Phillips catalogue singles out the intense blue and velvety lustre that made Kashmir the benchmark against which other sapphires are judged. Within this sale, the estimates suggest how differently a cabochon and a faceted stone can be weighed: the brooch is estimated at CHF 830,000–1,230,000, while a ring set with a cushion-shaped Kashmir sapphire of 16.40 carats (lot 423), more than two carats lighter, carries an estimate more than twice as high, at CHF 1,850,000–2,900,000. A third Kashmir sapphire, of 5.62 carats, is set in a ring from a French noble family (lot 335, CHF 125,000–200,000).

Paris, Between Two Expositions

Three Parisian jewels complete the nineteenth-century thread, all made within barely fifteen years. Boucheron, founded in 1858 by Frédéric Boucheron and the first jeweller to open on the Place Vendôme, exhibited at the Expositions Universelles of 1889 and 1900, as the Phillips catalogue recalls. Its bangle of circa 1881–1885 (lot 367) shows the house in an exploratory mood, with overlapping floral motifs of Indo-Persian inspiration set with rose-cut diamonds and enamelled in blue, red, green and white. The bracelet carries no signature. Its identity rests on a fitted case signed Boucheron and on a certificate of authenticity from the house, the kind of archival confirmation on which the attribution of an unsigned antique jewel depends.

The Boucheron necklace of circa 1891 (lot 347) was built to change. Of laurel-leaf design, it is set with diamonds and highlighted with button-shaped natural pearls, two of which SSEF has tested and confirmed as natural saltwater pearls. It divides into two bracelets and comes with two additional numbered links, so that its owners could wear it at the throat or on both wrists; at some point, one of them added a fitting that allows it to be worn as a tiara.

René Lalique’s ‘The Olive Branch’ (lot 357), dated circa 1893–1895, comes from an earlier Lalique than the one most collectors know. According to the house’s own history, he had taken over the workshop of the jeweller Jules Destape on Place Gaillon in 1885 and opened a workshop at 20 Rue Thérèse around 1890, years before the 1900 Exposition Universelle crowned his career as a jeweller. The bracelet interlaces two branches set with diamonds, and its round and oval cabochon emeralds stand for olives at different stages of growth on the same branch, as the catalogue essay describes.

The catalogue identifies the bracelet as one of Lalique’s earliest uses of the olive motif, a symbol of peace and longevity to which he would return in the ‘Peace’ brooch. That jewel, with doves perched on olive branches, was presented to Edith Wilson on behalf of the citizens of Paris at the Hôtel de Ville on 16 December 1918, a month after the Armistice, and is today in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, as Smithsonian Magazine reports. Like the Boucheron necklace, ‘The Olive Branch’ arrives with a later tiara fitting. Designed for the wrist and the neck, both jewels were at some point adapted to be worn in the hair, and like the Hennell necklace and the Vienna brooch they reach the saleroom shaped by the people who owned them as much as by the jewellers who made them.

Signatures of a Later Century, and a Dancer’s Cross

Beyond the nineteenth century, the sale gathers a compact anthology of twentieth-century signatures: an Art Deco ruby, sapphire and diamond brooch by Lacloche Frères of circa 1925 (lot 353); three jewels by Van Cleef & Arpels, from the gold and diamond ‘Ludo Briquettes’ bracelet of the late 1930s (lot 407) and the ‘Puppy’ brooch of circa 1966 from ‘La Boutique’ collection (lot 400) to the amethyst, coloured sapphire and coral ‘Liz’ sautoir (lot 422); and a pair of lapis lazuli and diamond ‘Éventail’ ear clips by JAR (lot 398).

René Boivin’s ‘Feuille d’érable’ brooch of circa 1948 (lot 416) has kept its papers. It bears the maker’s mark of Robert Davière and comes with its original receipt and drawings, a certificate from Françoise Cailles and a Boivin certificate of authenticity. For a signed mid-century jewel, a receipt and drawings of this kind give an attribution a solidity that a signature alone cannot.

The highest estimates belong to the gems: alongside the 16.40-carat Kashmir sapphire, a pair of Harry Winston ear clips set with Colombian emeralds of 9.67 and 10.29 carats (lot 424), a collection of nine fancy colour diamonds (lot 419) and a Bucherer ring with a D colour, Flawless, Type IIa diamond of 10.09 carats (lot 387). The final lot of the sale, a ring set with a Fancy Vivid Blue diamond of 1.35 carats (lot 426), carries the same estimate as the 16.40-carat sapphire, CHF 1,850,000–2,900,000, for a stone of little more than a single carat.

The Collections & Provenance section ends on its most modest estimate. Lot 334, a gold and gem-set cross pendant on a gold chain, offered without reserve at CHF 1,700–2,600, comes from the collection of Rudolf Nureyev. Phillips illustrates it with a photograph by Hans Hammarskiöld of the dancer in the grounds of Drottningholm Palace, near Stockholm, in August 1967, during his visit to stage The Nutcracker at the Royal Swedish Opera. Like Queen Mary’s necklace, it is a jewel whose value lies almost entirely in the person who chose it.

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The Geneva Jewels Auction: VII, Phillips, Hotel President, Quai Wilson 47, Geneva. Monday 9 November 2026, 3pm CET. Viewing from 4 to 9 November; priority bidding closes on 7 November.

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Sources

The sale and its catalogue

• Phillips, The Geneva Jewels Auction: VII – online catalogue (CH060426)
• Phillips, press release “Phillips Announces Highlights of The Geneva Jewels Auction: VII”, 1 October 2026
• Phillips, “The Geneva Jewels Global Tour: Fall 2026”

Queen Mary’s Hennell necklace (lot 336)

• Phillips, lot 336, Hennell, cultured pearl and diamond necklace
• Sotheby’s, Magnificent Jewels, 2004, lot 150, Diamond and cultured pearl necklace, Hennell, London, 1928

Empress Eugénie’s bracelet (lot 332) and the 7.96-carat emerald brooch (lot 388)

• Phillips, lot 332, emerald, diamond and gold bracelet, mid 19th century
• Phillips press release (above) for the La Rochelambert–La Poëze provenance and lot 388

Kashmir sapphires and the Rozet & Fischmeister brooch (lots 425, 423, 335)

• Phillips, lot 425, Rozet & Fischmeister, sapphire and diamond brooch
• Phillips, lot 423, sapphire and diamond ring, 16.40 carats
• GIA, Historical Reading List: Kashmir Sapphires
• MAK Vienna, collection records: Rozet & Fischmeister

Boucheron and Lalique (lots 367, 347, 357)

• Phillips, lot 367, Boucheron, diamond, enamel and gold bracelet
• Phillips, lot 347, Boucheron, natural pearl and diamond necklace
• Phillips, lot 357, René Lalique, ‘The Olive Branch’
• Lalique, “The Story of Lalique”
• Smithsonian Magazine, “A Symbol That Failed”

Twentieth-century signed jewels

• Phillips, lot 416, René Boivin, ‘Feuille d’érable’

Direct communication

• Anna Passmore, Senior Press Officer, Phillips: written answers to High Jewellery Dream, 5 November 2026 (lots 332, 336, 367, 416 and 425; estimates)
• Benoît Repellin, Worldwide Head of Jewellery, Phillips: statement provided to High Jewellery Dream through the Phillips press office, 5 November 2026