Posted by Arthur on January 31, 2016, 8:09 am, in reply to "Greville bequest"
Thank you, Vincent.
I have personally no problem with the Vladimir Tiara in the emerald version (the Cambridge emerald drops are indeed slightly too large for the gaps between the circles of the Vladimir Tiara, but the tiara still looks great like this).
But as Hugh Roberts himself points out in his book The Queen's Diamonds (page 174), the Durbar emerald necklace, made in 1911, is of "strikingly modern design": no elaborate scrolls or festoons, just the cabochon stones, with a thin diamond border, linked with two simple lines of small diamonds, and the two emerald and diamond pendants of unequal length. I think that this modern design would match very well with the Art Déco design of the Greville emerald tiara, made in 1921 (but of course, I would be happy to see this tiara, whatever necklace is chosen to accompany it! ).
We know that the picture posted at the beginning of this thread (and initially published in Vincent's book about Boucheron) depicts the Greville emerald tiara as it was made in 1921 (only ten years after the "strikingly modern" Durbar necklace...). And the Australian Women's Weekly's article published in 1947 mentions that "a tiara of diamonds and cabochon emeralds" was part of the Greville bequest, at the death of Mrs Greville in 1942. But we can not totally exclude the possibility that the tiara was transformed at some point between 1921 and 1942, possibly by another jeweller than Boucheron (we know that Mrs Greville had some of her Boucheron jewels transformed by Cartier).