Posts Tagged ‘necklace holder’

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC is home to so much that’s rare and wonderful in the world.One of the most terrific collection is the bundle of gems in the Museum of Natural History.

There you can see wonderful crystals and minerals in their natural form, as well as some of the most incredible pieces of jewelry ever created.  There are crowns worn by royalty, enormous diamond earrings worn by the doomed French queen Marie-Antoinette.

They’re all stunning and grand, but nothing is more mysterious than the rare earth-green of the emerald.  The Smithsonian is home to the most fabulous emeralds ever known, and we’re incredibly fortunate to have them in this country.

One doesn’t normally associate beautiful jewelry with the time of the Spanish Inquisition.  But in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection of gems, there’s an exquisite necklace holder stand and a necklace badge holder of diamonds and emeralds.

It’s a impressive double row of diamonds and emeralds ending in a chandelier of emeralds.  There’s unfortunately very little information about the provenance of these necklace holders.  The large diamonds and Columbian emeralds were most likely cut in India in the 17th century.

This would make them an example of the earliest gems from the Smithsonian's Collection.  There are really only legends surrounding this wall necklace holder display stand were used in this era.It indicates that it has been worn by the French and Spanish dignitaries.

In the early 20th century, it was purchased by the Maharajah of Indore, whose boy sold the necklace in 1947 to Harry Winston.  Winston subsequently sold the necklace to Mrs. Pittsburgh's Hubbard Cora Williams. She left it to the Smithsonian in 1972.

Emeralds are a kind of crystal known as beryls.  Beryls are usually clear crystals, but when incorporating chromium or vanadium, they reach numerous gradations of green.  The purest green is the rarest emeralds and many people really prefer an emerald which has a blue-green tint.

Before the 16th century, the only known emerald deposits were in Cleopatra’s Egyptian mines.  But after emeralds were found in Columbia, those became the gold standard in emeralds.

Columbian emeralds have been discovered by archaeologists among artifacts of such clans as the Inca, Maya, Aztec, Toltec and the lesser-known Chibcha Indians.  Emeralds are among the rarest of gemstones and can be more expensive per carat than even the best diamonds!

They are a hard mineral, with a Moh’s hardness scale of seven or eight ( compared with a diamond’s 10 ).  While most emeralds are found in Africa and Russia, there were discoveries of emerald deposits in North Carolina!