Thank you, Kasper, for these pictures and for the account of your visit to Ekaterinburg. It must be a very moving place.
The lady on the picture you have posted is not the last Russian Empress, Alexandra Feodorovna (1872-1918, née Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt), but her eldest sister, Grand-Duchess Elisabeth Feodorovna (1864-1918, née Elisabeth of Hesse-Darmstadt, wife of Grand-Duke Sergei Alexandrovich). And the stones are not rubies, but emeralds.
The emerald parure she is wearing was given by Grand-Duchess Elisabeth to her niece, Grand-Duchess Maria Pavlovna, when the latter married Prince William of Sweden, Duke of Sodermanland. Maria had the tiara remodelled in a more geometric pattern.
Grand-Duchess Maria later sold the parure, after her divorce, to Queen Maria of Romania, who presented it to her daughter (also named Maria!) on the occasion of her wedding to King Alexander I of Yugoslavia. The necklace was remodelled into an Art Deco sautoir.
The parure remained for a few decades in the Yugoslav collection, but was eventually sold after the Yugoslav royal family had to go into exile after WW2. The tiara is currently in the collection of Van Cleef and Arpels and is regularly loaned for exhibitions (the cabochon stones have been replaced, though, by paste stones. The whereabouts of the necklace are unknown, if I well remember.
The large stomacher worn by Grand-Duchess Elisabeth was sold, after she became a widow, to Sultan Abdulhamid of Turkey. It was later sold at auction, and its whereabouts is unknown:
on April 6, 2015, 3:27 am, in reply to "
