
It’s rare that heirloom-quality royal jewelry becomes available for purchase, but right now, one of Queen Mary’s jewels is up for sale: a fascinating diamond and multi-colored pearl bar brooch.

The brooch is being sold by M.S. Rau, a fine arts and antiques gallery located in New Orleans. The company also has a jewelry boutique with a whole range of interesting antique pieces for sale. Among them is this diamond brooch, which is set with three pearls: a white South Seas pearl, a black Tahitian pearl, and a rare pink conch pearl.
Here’s a description of the piece from the M.S. Rau website: “The pin showcases an extraordinarily rare 14mm natural pink conch pearl, one of the most coveted gemstones in the world. Conch pearls occur only in nature, cannot be cultured, and are found in approximately one in every 15,000 conch shells, making their rarity truly remarkable.
“Flanking this centerpiece is an 11mm natural white South Sea pearl and a 12mm natural iridescent Tahitian pearl, each with remarkable luster and beauty. These pearls are set in platinum and surrounded by 1.30 carats of carre cut diamonds, celebrated for their brilliance and precision. Housed in its original blue tooled leather case by Marzo, Paris, this brooch has been perfectly preserved.”

The Rau website offers this provenance for the piece: “Once owned by Queen Mary of England, grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II, this exceptional Belle Époque brooch holds a significant place in the British Crown’s royal history.” The jewel does indeed appear to be the same one worn for decades by Queen Mary. She liked to pin the brooch to her hats and to the bodices of her day dresses. Above, she wears the brooch on her hat as she travels to Westminster Abbey for an installation ceremony for ten new knights of the Order of the Bath in May 1928.
M.S. Rau posits a ca. 1910 creation date for the brooch. That’s certainly possible—I would imagine that they have more documentation than the sketch shared on their website—but the design of the piece makes me wonder whether it was made a few years later. The stark, geometric arrangement of the diamond sections of the brooch suggests an Art Deco-era date to me.

Queen Mary owned several pieces of jewelry with pink conch pearls, one of which definitely was made earlier in time. This diamond clover brooch, which is set with a pink conch pearl, a white pearl, a gray pearl, and a golden pearl, was reportedly made around 1865.

The brooch was in Mary’s collection by the turn of the twentieth century. She wore it, pinned at the neck of her bodice, for a portrait photograph taken by E.H. Mills during her tenure as Princess of Wales. The picture was published as a postcard, and the National Portrait Gallery collection includes another photograph from the same session.

Queen Mary usually wore the clover brooch with the pink pearl section pointed upwards. Here, she wears it again in that position during a visit to London’s East End in February 1917. Mary, with King George and Princess Mary, toured areas affected by the recent January 1917 explosion at a munitions factory in Silvertown that had been manufacturing TNT as part of the ongoing war effort.

There was also another, more modern diamond and conch pearl brooch in Mary’s collection by the middle of the 1920s. This one features a very Art Deco diamond design surrounding a pink conch pearl, with a second conch pearl used as a pendant drop.

The brooch was another much-loved piece, and Queen Mary wore it for decades for a whole range of events and occasions. This is one of my personal favorite moments: her visit to the diamond-cutting factory in Clerkenwell Green with her granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth, in March 1948. The two were on hand to discuss plans for the cutting of the spectacular Williamson Pink Diamond, which had been offered to Elizabeth as a wedding present a few months earlier.

Here’s another look at that third brooch from Mary’s collection, the pearl and diamond bar brooch now being sold by M.S. Rau. It shares more design similarities, to my mind, with the 1925 pendant brooch than with the 1865 clover brooch. The diamond sections almost look like they could have been made to coordinate with the 1925 piece.

Fittingly, Mary liked to wear the two pieces together. Here, at Wimbledon in July 1933, she wears the pendant brooch pinned at her neck and the bar brooch on her hat. (Beside her is King Faisal I of Iraq, who was on a diplomatic visit to London that summer, just a few months before his death. He clearly enjoyed watching the ladies’ singles final, in which the American Helen Moody defeated Britain’s Dorothy Round in three sets.)

Mary also wore the two brooches together for an important family occasion a few years later: the christening of her grandson, Prince Michael of Kent, in the private chapel at Windsor Castle on August 4, 1942. She again has the bar brooch pinned to her hat and the pendant brooch pinned at the neck of her bodice.
This is a smaller section of a larger group photograph from the event. In this excerpted view you see the three Kent kids: Prince Edward (now the Duke of Kent) holding Queen Mary’s hand; Princess Alexandra standing between Mary and the Duchess of Kent, and the Duchess holding baby Michael. Also pictured, standing in the back, are King George VI and King Haakon VII of Norway, both godfathers, flanking the Duke of Kent, who also stood proxy for another godfather, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the service. Sadly, this was the last happy family moment for the Duke of Kent, who died just three weeks later in a plane crash in Scotland.

On at least one occasion, Mary wore all three of her conch pearl jewels together. This photograph was taken as she arrived at the Royal Tournament, a military pageant and tattoo, at the Olympia Exhibition Centre with her granddaughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. The event was held on May 22, 1939, just a few months before the start of World War II.

Here’s a closer view of Mary’s conch pearl jewels for the tournament. She has the clover brooch pinned to her hat, the pendant brooch pinned at her throat, and the bar brooch pinned lower on her bodice. Pearl earrings and a three-stranded pearl necklace completed the jewelry look.

When Queen Mary died in 1953, much of her jewelry collection was inherited by her granddaughter, who was by then Queen Elizabeth II. But Mary also gifted and bequeathed pieces to other family members, including her daughters-in-law and granddaughters. Two of the conch pearl pieces—the clover brooch and the pendant brooch—ended up with Mary’s only daughter, Princess Mary, Princess Royal and Countess of Harewood. The two brooches stayed with the Lascelles family until November 1999, when they were both auctioned at Christie’s in Geneva. The clover brooch sold for 63,250 CHF, while the pendant brooch sold for 119,000 CHF.

Did the bar brooch also end up with Princess Mary’s descendants? We don’t know. The experts at M.S. Rau have offered just a brief, puzzling public statement regarding the jewel’s chain of ownership, stating that the brooch was “almost certainly a gift from the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.” They do not offer any clarification on the identity of the recipient, so presumably they mean that it was a gift from the Windsors to Queen Mary.
As Queen Mary was already wearing the brooch by 1928, years before David and Wallis even met, it seems impossible that the Duchess was involved in the acquisition or presentation of the brooch. It certainly could have been a gift from David, who was then the Prince of Wales. But what happened to it in the years between Mary’s passing and now? And how did it end up in an antique jewelry boutique in New Orleans, Louisiana? (If any of our lovely readers are heading there for the Super Bowl this weekend, maybe stop in and ask some pointed questions…?)
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