Thank you a lot, dear Ursula (and also to Laura, Uwe and Volker)!
I think it is important to note that the brooch photographed next to Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe's portrait is not the brooch bought at the 1887 auction by Sir Ogden Goelet (and later worn by May and Mary, Duchesses of Roxburghe), but the one bought by Bapst, and later in the possession of the Bulgarian royal family, and recently acquired by the Louvre.
As reminded by Ursula, the pearl parure of the French Crown jewels included four brooches of identical design... well, almost identical, but not exactly:
In 1887, Sir Ogden Goelet bought the biggest and most expensive of the four brooches (numbered 1 in the auction catalogue). On the picture above, it is the brooch on the bottom right. This brooch can be differenciated from the three other brooches by the number of diamonds around the two round pearls (10 diamonds around each round pearl, whereas the two brooches on the left both have 8 diamonds around the round pearls, and the brooch on the top right has 10 diamonds around the top pearl and 9 diamonds around the bottom pearl). Moreover, the "Goelet" brooch has a thin inner row of diamonds around the top round pearl, within the outer row of larger diamonds: it is perfectly visible on the Duchess of Roxburghe's portrait visible on Ursula's website, and is a difference from the three other brooches.
As mentioned by Ursula, Sir Ogden Goelet bought several jewels from the Crown's collection: besides the pearl and diamond brooch we are discussing, he also bought the pair of bracelets and the coronet of the pearl parure.
I suppose that the pair of pearl and diamond bracelets of the Crown jewels is still in the Roxburghe family. In his book about Boucheron (Boucheron, Archives secrètes, published in 2009), our fellow poster and jewel expert Vincent Meylan mentions in his book that the two bracelets could be worn as a necklace (or more probably as a choker), and that Mrs Goelet brought them in this form at least twice (1901 and 1903) to Boucheron to have the pearls restrung. And I have found this picture of the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe, at Ascot on 17 June 2009: the Duchess is wearing a pearl choker which looks strikingly like the pair of bracelets, with their five rows of pearls and their diamond vertical bars:
I also wonder if Ogden Goelet did not bought one of the two large diamond bow brooches of the Crown jewels. The two bow brooches were bought in 1887 by a M. Doutrelon, but Mr Goelet could have acquired one of them later. His daughter May is wearing on this picture, on her corsage, a large bow brooch which looks very similar to the one of the Crown collection:
In his book about Boucheron, Meylan also mentions that in 1905, Sir Ogden Goelet's daughter, May, Duchess of Roxburghe, commissioned from Boucheron a sapphire and diamond tiara which was an exact replica of the tiara of the sapphire parure of the French Crown jewels.
on April 22, 2015, 7:41 pm, in reply to "
