Necklace Holders: Carving Their Stature In History
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC is home to such a lot that’s rare and fantastic in the world. One of the more spectacular collections is the collection of gems in the Museum of Natural History.
There you can see glorious crystals and minerals in their natural form, as well as some of the most superb pieces of jewellery ever created. There are crowns worn by royalty, giant diamond earrings worn by the condemned French queen Marie-Antoinette.
They’re all stunning and amazing, 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 are incredibly fortunate to have them in this country.
One doesn’t routinely associate gorgeous jewelry with the time of the Spanish Inquisition. But in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection of gems, there is a beautiful necklace holder stand and a necklace badge holder of diamonds and emeralds.
It is a spectacular double row of diamonds and emeralds ending in a chandelier of emeralds. There’s unfortunately very little info about the provenance of these necklace holders. The large diamonds and Columbian emeralds were most likely cut in India in the 17th century.
This makes them an early example of gems that are cut from the Smithsonian's Collection. There are actually only legends surrounding this wall necklace holder display stand were used in this era.It would indicate that the Spanish and French used to wear them dignitaries.
In the early 20th century, it was bought by the Maharajah of Indore, whose boy sold the necklace in 1947 to Harry Winston. Winston afterwards sold the necklace to Mrs. William Cora Hubbard of Pittsburgh. She gave it to the Smithsonian in 1972.
Emeralds are a kind of crystal known as beryls. Beryls are normally clear crystals, but when tinged with chromium or vanadium, they attain diverse gradations of green. The purest green is the most rare emeralds and many folks actually like 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 discovered in Columbia, those became the gold standard in emeralds.
Columbian emeralds have been discovered by archaeologists among artifacts of such tribes as the Inca, Maya, Aztec, Toltec and the lesser-known Chibcha Indians. Emeralds are among the rarest of gemstones and can be dearer per carat than even the best diamonds!
They are a hard mineral, with a Moh’s toughness scale of 7 or eight ( compared to a diamond’s ten ). While most emeralds are found in Africa and Russia, there were discoveries of emerald deposits in North Carolina!
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