The Antique Pearl Tiara

The glamorous Queen Máxima of the Netherlands has sported an array of tiaras from the Dutch royal family’s vast jewel collection, but back in 2001, she selected a very small tiara from the family’s stash for her gala jewel debut: the base of the Antique Pearl Tiara.

The tiara, which is owned by the Dutch royal family, is sometimes called the Pavlovnik pearl tiara. That’s because Anna Pavlovna, the queen consort of King Willem II of the Netherlands, once had a tiara quite a lot like it. Exactly what happened to Anna’s tiara, which she wears in this 1849 state portrait, is unclear, but it seems likely that it was dismantled at some point.

The current Antique Pearl Tiara, which was made in 1900, was designed to mimic the shape of the original Pavlovnik tiara. The large, pear-shaped pearls that sit upright in the tiara are even older than the piece itself. At least some of them belonged to Amalia of Solms-Braunfels, a seventeenth-century Dutch princess who shares her name with Princess Catharina-Amalia, the current Princess of Orange.

Queen Wilhelmina was the first wearer of the 1900 pearl tiara, and it has been worn by all Dutch queens since then. Queen Juliana inherited the piece from her mother in 1962. She placed the tiara in the family’s jewel foundation, ensuring that all future queens of the Netherlands will also be able to wear it.

Since then, Princess Beatrix and two of her sisters, Princess Margriet and Princess Irene, have also donned the tiara. Beatrix wore the tiara often in her younger years for gala dinners and state banquets, including an appearance during the 1961 Austrian state visit to the Netherlands.

Beatrix continued to wear the tiara during her tenure as Queen of the Netherlands, from her mother’s abdication in 1980 until her own abdication in 2013. The tiara was carefully nestled into her signature bouffant hairstyle for gala events, including this dinner in Estonia in 2008.

On the night before Queen Beatrix’s abdication and King Willem-Alexander’s inauguration, Princess Irene of the Netherlands wore the tiara for a special dinner held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Although the tiara is usually worn with Amalia’s pearls, Queen Máxima first wore the tiara without them. Her very first tiara outing happened before she was even a princess: she wore the pearl tiara (sans pearls) to the wedding of Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway in 2001. She also wore the base of the tiara solo during a 2003 visit from the Italian president. The base of the tiara has also been worn without its pearls by Princess Margriet and by Princess Viktoria, the wife of Princess Irene’s son, Prince Jaime of Bourbon-Parma.

Today, Máxima usually wears the complete piece often. Notably, she chose it for the striking portrait released to mark her fortieth birthday in 2011.

Maxima has continued to wear the spectacular pearl tiara since becoming Queen of the Netherlands in 2013. Now that all three of her daughters are adults, it’s only a matter of time until we see the next generation of Dutch princesses wear the family tiara, too.