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Two groups of sapphires once worn by Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna lead Sotheby’s Royal & Noble Jewels sale in Geneva on 11 November 2026: the 197.80-carat Romanov Sapphire, and a demi-parure that passed through Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria to the Swedish royal family.
A Stone the Commissars Discounted
When the Soviet commission led by the mineralogist Aleksandr Fersman finished inventorying the Russian Crown Jewels in the mid-1920s, it sorted the imperial treasure according to a strict hierarchy of worth. According to Sotheby’s account of the dispersal, the pieces judged most important to the nation’s history were kept in Moscow, where they now form the core of the State Diamond Fund. A second group, of some historical interest yet deemed expendable, was sent to London and offered at Christie’s in 1927 through intermediaries. A third group comprised gemstones whose merit was considered purely intrinsic, and these were sold off anonymously, their imperial past left out of the transaction. A cushion-shaped Ceylon sapphire of 197.80 carats belonged to that last category.
A century later the same stone leads Sotheby’s Royal & Noble Jewels sale in Geneva, catalogued as the Romanov Sapphire and offered for the very history the commission chose to set aside. It shares the sale with a second group of sapphires that, by family tradition, also belonged to the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, born Princess Dagmar of Denmark. The two lots open a sale of nearly eighty jewels in which provenance does much of the talking, from the Romanovs to the Houses of Orléans and Braganza, the Swedish royal family and the ducal house of Devonshire.
The Pair on the Skirt
The Fersman inventory records it as the larger of two brooch-clasps set with ancient Ceylon sapphires, entry no. 161, weighing 249.25 metric carats, in a setting the catalogue describes as modern, by Fabergé; its companion, of flatter Indian cut, weighed 142. The difference from today’s 197.80 carats suggests that the stone was recut at some point after 1925, a detail the sale catalogue does not mention. The date on which it entered the imperial collection is not recorded. Sotheby’s specialists take its unusual faceting as evidence of a Mughal-era cut, which would place it among the many treasury stones that were mined and cut far from St Petersburg and only later reset in European mounts, the visible trace of an empire that liked to present itself as the hinge between East and West.
Its most famous appearance came in February 1903, at the costume ball held in the Winter Palace for the bicentenary of St Petersburg. The court came dressed in the fashions of seventeenth-century Muscovy, in costumes made from designs by the artist Sergei Solomko and encrusted, by contemporary accounts, with original jewels of extraordinary value. An album of photographs published in 1904 under the direction of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna recorded the evening, and a complete copy survives at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford. The Hoover Institution describes the occasion as the last imperial ball in Russian history. According to the Sotheby’s catalogue, the Dowager Empress wore both sapphires of the pair, in their Fabergé settings, on the front panel of her skirt. Only one of them can be traced today.
A Soprano’s Sautoir
The anonymous Soviet sale left no buyer’s name on record, and the sapphire resurfaces in 1927 at Cartier, where it was acquired by Ganna Walska (1887–1984). Born Hanna Puacz in Brest, then within the Russian Empire, Walska was a soprano of greater ambition than acclaim whose marriages, among them to the International Harvester heir Harold McCormick, financed one of the most daring jewellery collections of the interwar years. Cartier sold her the stone as the central pendant of a sautoir. Two years later, the catalogue records, she had it remounted on a second sautoir beside a carved Mughal emerald of 256.60 carats bought in 1925, a pairing that suited her taste for saturated colour and oriental drama. The necklace was reworked repeatedly over the following decades, and by the time it next came to auction the sapphire hung from a shorter rope of tumbled sapphire beads, probably assembled in the 1940s.
Walska’s later life belongs to a garden. With her last husband, the scholar of Tibetan Buddhism Theos Bernard, she bought an estate in Montecito, California, and spent the second half of her life turning it into Lotusland, opened to the public as a botanical garden after her death. In 1971, after what Rose Thomas, Research Associate at Ganna Walska Lotusland, describes in an essay published by Sotheby’s as three years of indecision, she sent 146 jewels to auction in New York and put the proceeds into the garden, most memorably into its collection of rare cycads. The Romanov Sapphire was lot 75 of that sale, held by Sotheby Parke Bernet on 1 April 1971. It returned to the rooms at Sotheby’s Geneva on 18 November 1992 as lot 497, mounted this time on a torsade of emerald and sapphire beads.
Cartier, Once More
In 2015 the stone returned to the workshops of the house that had first sold it to Walska. Cartier set it at the centre of a bracelet whose geometric field of brilliant-cut diamonds, punctuated by modified shield step-cut diamonds at either side of the sapphire, echoes the Art Deco vocabulary of the 1920s mounting. An engraved rock crystal centre set with triangular diamonds can replace the sapphire, so the bracelet also has a second, paler life. In this form the jewel was shown in Cartier’s 2019 exhibition at the National Art Center, Tokyo, The Crystallization of Time.
The laboratory record is unusually dense for a historic stone. SSEF examined it in 2014 and again in January 2026; Gübelin in 2015 and in December 2025. All four reports conclude a Ceylon origin with no indications of heating, and the two most recent are accompanied by Appendix Letters. Eleven years of consistent findings from both Swiss laboratories give bidders a firm footing on the two questions that matter most at this size, origin and treatment. The estimate of CHF 850,000–1,700,000 equates to roughly CHF 4,300 to CHF 8,600 per carat. A French edition of the Fersman catalogue, Les Joyaux du Trésor de Russie, issued in four parts by the People’s Commissariat of Finance between 1924 and 1926, accompanies the lot, so the inventory that once consigned the sapphire to anonymity now travels with it as proof of its pedigree.
Dagmar’s Other Blue
The second imperial lot tells a quieter story, carried by family tradition more than by inventory. Lot 1067 is a demi-parure of graduated cabochon sapphires framed by millegrain-set old European-cut diamonds and highlighted with single- and rose-cut diamonds, comprising a necklace and a pair of pendent earrings. Its fitted case is stamped Rath München and bears the gilt-metal cypher of Princess Sibylla of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1908–1972), mother of King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. An SSEF report identifies fifteen of the sapphires as Ceylon and one as Burmese, with no indications of heating. The estimate is CHF 300,000–500,000.
The necklace was a wedding present. When Sibylla married Prince Gustaf Adolf, Duke of Västerbotten, in 1932, it came from Ferdinand of Bulgaria (1861–1948), who had abdicated as Tsar in 1918 and was living out his exile in Coburg, the former capital of Sibylla’s father, Charles Edward, the last reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and a grandson of Queen Victoria. Ferdinand himself was born into the Kohary branch of the same house and was a discerning buyer of gems: the catalogue notes that he acquired a pair of sapphire earrings and a natural pearl and diamond brooch at the 1887 sale of the French Crown Jewels. According to family tradition, the cabochon sapphires had belonged to Maria Feodorovna. Sotheby’s suggests he may have bought them from her during her last years in Denmark, where she died in 1928, though no document of the transaction has been published.
The jewel bears the marks of a long working life. At some point the two sapphires that hung from the front of the necklace were detached to become the present earrings, the fitted case was adapted to match, and its imprint shows that the necklace was also lengthened, which accounts for the catalogue’s dating of early twentieth century and later. Sibylla, widowed in 1947 when her husband died in an air crash at Copenhagen, wore it for decades, often with tiaras from the Swedish royal collection, and lent it to her daughters as they took on official duties. It then passed to Princess Birgitta (1937–2024), who wore it at the weddings of her nieces, Crown Princess Victoria in 2010 and Princess Madeleine in 2013. Birgitta died on Mallorca on 4 December 2024, and the demi-parure now appears at auction with no earlier sale recorded in its provenance.
The demi-parure leads a group of seven lots from Princess Birgitta’s collection, six of them catalogued as formerly in her mother’s. The most remarkable is a Belle Époque brooch of circa 1910 (lot 1066) centred on a cushion-shaped padparadscha sapphire of 23.64 carats, collet-set within a millegrain border of circular- and single-cut diamonds.
An SSEF report of September 2026 confirms a Ceylon origin with no indications of heating and is accompanied by an Appendix Letter; the estimate of CHF 40,000–60,000 places it among the more accessible important stones in the sale.
Beside it are a 7.58-carat Colombian emerald ring in a case stamped by the Stockholm court jewellers Holm & Hallgren (lot 1063, CHF 12,000–18,000) and a Belle Époque seed pearl necklace (lot 1065, CHF 2,000–3,000) that King Gustaf V and Queen Victoria gave to their daughter-in-law, Crown Princess Margaret, on the birth of Prince Bertil in 1912, and that Bertil in turn gave to his niece Birgitta as a christening present in 1937.
A Sale Built on Lineage
Royal & Noble Jewels has become the signature of Sotheby’s November season in Geneva, continuing a line that includes the single-owner sales of the Bourbon Parma jewels and Vienna 1900: An Imperial and Royal Collection. According to the auction house, each of its last three editions sold every lot. The 2026 sale will be on view at the Mandarin Oriental, Geneva, from 6 to 10 November, and the live auction begins there on 11 November at 5pm CET.
“The extraordinary success of our Royal & Noble Jewels sales reflects collectors’ enduring fascination with jewels that combine exceptional gemstones, craftsmanship and history,” said Andres White Correal, Chairman, Jewellery Europe and Middle East, and Head of Noble Jewels at Sotheby’s, in the sale’s press release of 29 October 2026. “This season’s auction is led by rare treasures associated with some of Europe’s most important imperial and royal families, from the Romanovs to the Houses of Orléans and Braganza, each offering a unique window into history.”
The second part of this preview turns to the women of the House of Orléans, through a Mellerio tiara given to Marie Isabelle d’Orléans on her marriage in 1864 and two emerald jewels that belonged to her daughter Amélie, the last Queen of Portugal, and then to England: the Cartier black opal tiara worn by the Duchess of Devonshire at the 1953 coronation, whose full story HJD has already told, and a Kashmir sapphire and Colombian emerald ring once owned by Catherine Walston. For the Romanov Sapphire, the question is a precise one. In the 1920s the Fersman commission sold it as a gemstone alone, its imperial past deliberately left out of the transaction.
On 11 November bidders in Geneva will decide how much that past adds to the value of an unheated Ceylon sapphire of almost two hundred carats, which now travels with the very catalogue that once set its history aside.
Sources
The sale
- Sotheby’s, press release “Sotheby’s Geneva Royal & Noble Jewels Sale Highlights”, Geneva, 29 October 2026
- Sotheby’s, Royal & Noble Jewels, Geneva, 11 November 2026 – sale page
The Romanov Sapphire (lot 1080)
- Sotheby’s, lot 1080 – description, provenance, exhibition, literature and catalogue note
- Hoover Institution Library & Archives, images of Russia’s last imperial ball digitized
- Rose Thomas (Ganna Walska Lotusland), “The Remarkable Jewelry Collection of Madame Ganna Walska”, Sotheby’s
- Madame Ganna Walska
- Stefano Papi and Alexandra Rhodes, Famous Jewelry Collectors, London, 1999, pp. 170–171 (cited in the lot’s literature)
- A. E. Fersman (ed.), Russia’s Treasure of Diamonds and Precious Stones, Moscow, People’s Commissariat of Finances, 1925–1926, Part IV, no. 161, p. 18 and Plate LXXXVI, phot. 189 (GIA Library digitisation) → https://archive.org/details/RussiasTreasureOfDiamondsAndPreciousStones
Princess Sibylla’s demi-parure (lot 1067)
- Sotheby’s, lot 1067 – description, SSEF saleroom notice, provenance and catalogue note
- The Royal Court of Sweden, “HRH Princess Birgitta has passed away”, 4 December 2024
- Sotheby’s, lot 1066 – padparadscha sapphire and diamond brooch
- Sotheby’s, lot 1063 – emerald and diamond ring
- Sotheby’s, lot 1065 – Belle Époque seed pearl and diamond necklace