This splendid diamond necklace was made in 1811 by Napoleon I's Crown jeweller, François-Regnault Nitot, and was presented by Napoleon to his (second) wife Marie-Louise, as a gift to celebrate the birth of their son, Napoleon-François-Joseph-Charles, King of Rome (later Duke of Reichstadt), the long-awaited heir of Napoleon's throne.
The bill for the necklace amounted to 376,275 Francs of the time. That was 73% of the total sum of money dedicated to the birth presents for the Empress, which gives an idea of the value of the necklace. An expertise waged for the imperial household pointed out "the rarity of the collection, the size and beauty of the stones composing the necklace", and concluded that the price asked by Nitot was not over-estimated.
As the necklace was paid for by Napoleon's civil list, and not directly by the State's treasury, the necklace was considered as a personal belonging of the Empress, and not as part of the (State-owned) Crown Jewels' collection.
The necklace consisted of 30 large brilliant diamonds, from which were suspended 9 large diamonds (either pear-shaped, or oval with extra festoon-elements to give them a pear-shaped look) and 10 large briolette diamonds. The largest brilliant and the largest briolette, at the front of the necklace, weighed respectively 10.73 and 10.40 carats.
Empress Marie-Louise was portrayed with this necklace by Robert Lefèvre (the other diamond jewels on this portrait were part of the diamond parure of the Crown jewels, which was later dismantled after Napoleon's defeat and exile, and its stones reused into new parures for the Duchess of Angoulême):
Like all her personal jewels, the necklace was taken by Marie-Louise with her when she left France in 1814, and she retained it until her death in 1847. Appointed for her lifetime reigning Duchess of Parma, she was depicted several times with this necklace:
After her death,she bequeathed the necklace to her sister-in-law Archduchess Sophie (Emperor Franz-Joseph's mother), who removed two diamonds from the necklace to have a pair of diamond button earrings made. The necklace remained in the Habsburg-Lorraine family for several decades (though not in the main line).
Later, it was acquired in 1960 by Marjorie Merriweather Post from the American jeweller Harry Winston. Only two years later, in 1962, Marjorie Merriweather Post gave the necklace to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, where it is still displayed today, along another jewel of Marie-Louise, the tiara of her emerald and diamond parure (the emeralds of the tiara were later replaced by turquoise, while the necklace and earrings, with their original emeralds are in the Louvre Museum in Paris):
on August 23, 2015, 10:02 am, in reply to "
