Jewellery
Diamond Jewelry
Diana Scarisbrick (Thames & Hudson, £49.95)
LIKE CLOVES in a pomander, nuggets of splendid excess stud this handsome overview, such as the Duc de Saint-simon’s report of Louis XIV receiving a delegation from the King of Siam at Versailles in 1686 dressed in a ‘gold garment all studded with diamonds of prodigious size’, its value in excess of the wealth of the entire Siamese kingdom. By the late 1780s, the jewel box of Charlotte of Mecklenburgstrelitz, George III’S consort, was so swollen with large diamonds from India that observers of the Queen in her full regal rig doubted the stones were real. Little wonder, therefore, that Parisian jeweller J. B. Pouget, writing in 1762, claimed the later 18th century as ‘the age of the diamond’.
A leading authority in the field, Diana Scarisbrick celebrates the diamond’s long history of pre-eminence in power dressing. From its earliest availability in the West in the second half of the 14th century, the diamond was associated with royalty: a badge of rank and power. (Later, James I went a step further, acclaiming the stones, which he acquired with some avidity, as ‘sparks of the Divinitie’.) And so it continued for 500 years. Not until the end of the 19th century, when New York plutocrats of the Gilded Age showered their wives with diamonds—the author refers to the American ‘passion for jewellery reach[ing] epic proportions’— did the stone’s social exclusivity give way to a primary association with wealth, which endures today. Mrs Scarisbrick celebrates the current wide availability of diamonds and explores how this loss of exclusivity has effectively demythologised a jewel once considered to possess magical properties. Only our present Queen, she suggests, still wears diamond jewellery in line with age-old notions of royal splendour. She might have added Denmark’s Queen Margrethe. Although the omission of pictures of the Empress Eugenie, Queen Ena of Spain and Queen Mary in old age is a pity, this is a densely illustrated survey, written with authority—as well as a peppering of wit to add an appropriate degree of sparkle. Matthew Dennison