[video]
Description via Bonham’s Auction Catalogue.
Lot #118
Bonham’s Fine Jewelry Sale - London’s New Bond Street
An important fancy deep-blue diamond ‘Trombino’ ring, circa 1965. The cushion-shaped fancy deep-blue diamond, weighing 5.30 carats, set horizontally within a mount pavé-set with brilliant-cut diamonds and courses of baguette-cut diamonds, remaining diamonds approximately 2.00 carats total, signed Bulgari, ring size I, Bulgari pouch.
Sold for £6,201,250 inc. premium
Footnotes
Accompanied by a report from GIA stating that the 5.30 carat diamond is fancy deep blue, natural colour, VS2 clarity.
Report number 1156118343, dated 30 November 2012.
Blue diamonds are extraordinarily rare. Over the past ten years fewer than thirty blue diamonds over five carats have appeared at auction worldwide. If you compare this with the tens of thousands of colourless or “white” diamonds that have been sold in the same period, one can appreciate the excitement the appearance of a previously unrecorded blue diamond generates when it appears on the auction market. The blue diamond offered here, weighs 5.30 carats, and has never been offered at auction before.
The blue colour in the diamond is caused by trace elements of boron, classing it as Type IIb. Boron causes blue diamonds to become semi-conductors of electricity and the blue colour intensifies when the diamond is warm. Type IIb diamonds can also phosphoresce under short-wave UV light and glow red for several seconds.
The famous historic blue diamonds the Hope, the Wittelsbach-Graff (previously the Wittelsbach) and the Tereschenko are also Type IIb and are believed to have come from the legendary Golconda mines in India, an area that also yielded diamonds of purest white. Ancient Indian texts describe diamonds of grey to dark blue colour coming from the Pundra area. The common denominator of all Golconda diamonds, whether they are white or of fancy colour, is their high degree of transparency and liquid fire. This diamond certainly possesses these properties. Its flat, antique cut is also suggestive of an alluvial Golconda diamond.
The diamond is mounted in a “Trombino” ring made by Bulgari in the mid 1960s. Bulgari’s appreciation of the beauty and rarity of natural coloured diamonds spurred the firm’s buyers to become active in the Indian market during the 1950s and many ancestral diamonds that had belonged to maharajas and nawabs were bought. Also, during the 1950s, Bulgari purchased a fabulous collection of fancy-coloured diamonds from a French dealer who had been amassing the collection over many years and was justifiably proud of his valuable stock. Bulgari soon began to incorporate these coloured diamonds into contemporary jewels of the finest quality.
Link to original Lot description
[video]
The world’s largest internally flawless diamond is now the centrepiece of Mouawad’s latest masterpiece—L’Incomparable Diamond Necklace
Mouawad, the luxury jewellery and timepieces company, revealed at Doha Jewellery and Watch Exhibition, for the first time, its latest masterpiece creation-the Mouawad L’Incomparable Diamond Necklace featuring 91 diamonds totaling 637 carats in weight. The impressive diamond necklace embraces the Incomparable Diamond, the world’s largest internally flawless diamond graded by the GIA weighing 407.48 carats. The Mouawad L’Incomparable Diamond Necklace premiered in the Mouawad booth throughout the show.
In its rough state weighing 890 carats, the Incomparable Diamond made a long serendipitous journey before reaching Mouawad.
It was in 1980 in the Democratic Republic of Congo that a little girl found the diamond in a rubble pile of kimberlite that was sorted out because it was considered to be too bulky to possess any diamonds. The diamond exchanged hands and was made public in 1984 in its polished form. It was then put on display at several museums with the first one being the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.
The coloured shield step-cut diamond is now suspended gracefully from a striking diamond necklace featuring a cavalcade of pristine, radiant diamonds of various cuts sublimely intertwined by 18K rose gold.
“This is our fifth year at DJWE and for the third consecutive year we have chosen the show as the location for the global debut of our one-of-a-kind jewellery creations. The unveiling of our L’Incomparable Diamond Necklace is Mouawad’s special gift for the 10th anniversary of what we believe is the top event for the luxury market in the Middle East”, concluded Fred Mouawad, Guardian of the Mouawad Diamond Division.
“Through creativity, patience and verve, the artisans at Mouawad have crafted an impressive and sublime diamond necklace– giving the famous diamond a permanent throne”, commented Pascal Mouawad, Guardian of the Mouawad Retail Division, who flew to Doha to attend the unveiling event. “Befitting of a royal court, L’Incomparable Diamond Necklace leaves nothing to be desired except to grace the neck of a Queen or a very special woman that absolutely deserves nothing less.”
<a href=”http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/3275402/?claim=h9vbyyn3nfr”>Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>
Are You On Bloglovin? I am add me!
The engagement ring the young Napoleon ”must have broken his wallet” to buy for his fianceeJosephine shattered expectations today at the Osenat auction house in France when it sold for close to $1 million, Osenat’s expert Jean-Christophe Chataignier said.
The winning bidder, who wanted to stay completely anonymous, paid $949,000, almost 50 times the $20,000 Osenat had expected to bring in. Including the buyer’s 25 percent commission to Osenat, the total price for the ring was $1.17 million.
“In my wildest dreams, I did not think we would outsell the estimate by more than 47 times,” said Osenat’s Emily Villane, who led today’s auction. “We based the estimates in our catalog on the actual market value of the ring, minus Napoleon and Josephine provenance. It is not our job to tell bidders how much they should pay for the historical premium.”
There was intense interest in the ring, she said. In addition to the 300 people in the Fontainebleau auction house, about 50 more international bidders were hooked up by phone.
For the rest of the story see ABC News via Yahoo!:
The Donnersmarck Diamonds are a pair of yellow diamonds that were mounted in a pendant in a classic traditionally European style making it the most famous yellow diamond pendant in the world. The first, the pear shaped yellow diamond, is 82.48 carats and the second is a 102.54 carat yellow cushion cut diamond.
The Donnersmarck diamonds are named after the German industrial Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck, the rich son of a privileged European family. He gave them as a gift to his beloved first wife, Pauline Therese Lachmann , better known as La Paira.
In 2007, Sotheby’s sold the Donnersmarck Diamonds at auction to an anonymous phone buyer for $7.9 Million, almost twice the amount of the pre-auction appraisal of 2 Million Dollars each..
…and we all know, when it comes to fancy colored diamonds, it is ALL about the color!
[video]