The Hope Diamond

A 45.52 carat deep greyish-blue diamond, mined in India before 1668, sold to Louis XIV by the merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, cut in 1673 into the stone the French crown called the Diamant bleu de la Couronne, stolen from the Garde-Meuble in September 1792, recut by an unknown hand, recorded in London in September 1812, named after the banker who owned it by 1839, and given to the Smithsonian by Harry Winston in 1958, who sent it through the post.

Attached to it is a curse. The curse is folklore and it is merchandising. It was assembled from newspaper stories around 1909 to 1911, deployed by Pierre Cartier as a selling device, and turned into a film serial by a former owner's wife in 1921. It has no seventeenth or eighteenth century pedigree and the Smithsonian does not repeat it. This record states its origins once and then leaves it alone, because the documented chain is more remarkable than the invented one.

The single most important thing to know about this object is that it has been three different objects. The stone Tavernier drew in 1676, the French Blue of 1673 to 1792, and the Hope as it is today are the same material in three different shapes, and images of all three circulate, along with replicas and computer reconstructions. Getting them confused is the standard error in the literature. In 2009 a lead cast of the French Blue, catalogued and forgotten in a Paris museum, made it possible to prove the relationship instead of assuming it.

What it is, physically

45.52 carats, measured by the Gemological Institute of America in December 1988 at 25.60 by 21.78 by 12.00 millimetres. A cushion-shaped antique brilliant with a faceted girdle and extra facets on the pavilion, described by the Smithsonian as fancy deep greyish-blue.

It is a type IIb diamond. That classification is not decorative. Type IIb diamonds contain boron and almost no nitrogen, which is why they are blue and also why they conduct electricity, a property no other diamond type shares. Under short-wave ultraviolet light the Hope phosphoresces red, and the phosphorescence persists for some seconds after the light is removed. Smithsonian research has used the phosphorescence spectrum as an identifying signature for blue diamonds, which means the stone can be recognised without reference to any document at all.

The present mount is a pendant in which the diamond is surrounded by white diamonds and hung from a chain of further diamonds. The setting is not original to any part of the stone's French history; it dates from the Cartier period around 1910 to 1911.

Tavernier, and what he actually recorded

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, 1605 to 1689, was a French merchant who made six journeys to Persia and India between the 1630s and the 1660s and who dealt in gemstones at the highest level. He published an account of those journeys, Les Six Voyages, in 1676, and it contains an engraved plate of the notable diamonds he handled. One of them is the blue stone.

The plate is the earliest image of this object and it is the reason the pre-1673 shape is known at all. It shows a large, roughly triangular stone of irregular Indian cutting, not the neat symmetrical jewel of later engravings. Tavernier gives its weight in the old French carat, which was slightly heavier than the modern metric carat of exactly 0.2 grams, so the recorded figure and any modern figure are not directly comparable and the difference is not trivial at this size.

He sold it, with other stones, to Louis XIV. The transaction is usually dated 1668 or 1669 and the consideration is usually given as a large sum in livres together with a patent of nobility. The figures in circulation vary widely enough that this record does not assert one.

One point about the source deserves emphasis, because it is routinely misread. The Commons file most often used to illustrate the Tavernier stone is described there as a drawing of the French Blue. It is not. It is Tavernier's own 1676 plate, and it shows the stone as he sold it, before the French court recut it. The description on the file is wrong and the error is exactly the kind that propagates.

The French Blue

Louis XIV had the stone recut. The court jeweller usually named as responsible is Sieur Pitau, and the recutting is generally dated to 1673, although 1678 also appears in the literature. The result was a smaller, symmetrical, deliberately theatrical stone, recorded in the crown inventories as the blue diamond of the Crown, and it is the object modern writers call the French Blue.

In 1749 Louis XV had it set into an insignia of the Order of the Golden Fleece by the jeweller Andre Jacquemin, in company with the great red spinel known as the Cote de Bretagne, which had been carved into a dragon. That jewel was one of the most spectacular objects the French crown owned, and it is the context in which the blue diamond spent its last four decades in France.

What the French Blue actually looked like was, until recently, known only from drawings: a rendering associated with the 1749 setting, and an engraving published by Germain Bapst in 1889 with the drawing executed by Lucien Hirtz. Both are interpretations. Neither is a measurement.

The theft, and the twenty years

Between 11 and 17 September 1792, during the collapse of the French monarchy, the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne in Paris was robbed repeatedly over several nights. A large part of the French crown jewels was taken. Some was recovered. The French Blue was not, and it has never been recovered as the French Blue, because it no longer exists in that form.

The next documented appearance of a blue diamond of the right character is a memorandum written by the London diamond merchant John Francillon, dated September 1812, recording a blue diamond of 177 grains in the possession of Daniel Eliason. That weight converts to about 44.5 old carats, in the region of the Hope.

The date is the part that no account of this object should omit. The memorandum is dated two days after the twentieth anniversary of the theft. French law extinguished the state's claim after twenty years. Whether that timing is coincidence or calculation cannot be proved, and this record does not claim to know, but the coincidence is exact enough that it has shaped every subsequent discussion of how the stone reached England and who was waiting for the clock to run out.

Between 1792 and 1812 the stone was recut, from about 69 old carats to about 45. Nobody knows who did it, where, or on whose instructions. That recutting is the single most consequential act in the object's history, because it is what made a stolen national treasure into a saleable private jewel, and it is entirely undocumented.

The 2008 lead cast, and why it settled the question

For two centuries the identity of the Hope as the recut French Blue was an inference. It was a strong inference, resting on colour, on approximate weight and on the timing, but it could not be demonstrated, because the French Blue's exact geometry was known only from drawings made by people who were not measuring.

Then Francois Farges, a mineralogist at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, identified in the museum's own mineral collection a lead cast of the French Blue. It had been catalogued and forgotten. A lead cast is a physical negative of a real stone: unlike a drawing, it preserves the actual proportions and the actual facet arrangement.

Farges, with Scott Sucher, Herbert Horovitz and Jean-Marc Fourcault, published the work in Gems and Gemology in Spring 2009. A laser scan of the cast produced a computer model of the French Blue showing details of the cut that could not be inferred from the drawings. Models of the cast and of the Hope were then compared, and the Hope fits inside the French Blue. The paper's own conclusion is careful and this record keeps its wording: the models confirm that the Hope could have been recut from the French Blue.

There was a second finding, and it is less often reported. The catalogue entry associated with the lead cast at the museum suggests that Henry Philip Hope may have owned the French Blue after the 1792 theft and before it was recut. If that holds, the family that gave the stone its name was involved earlier and more directly than the standard account allows, and the twenty-year gap becomes a good deal less blank.

The Hope family, and the court that had to authorise a sale

Henry Philip Hope, a member of the Anglo-Dutch banking family, formed one of the great private gem collections of the early nineteenth century. A catalogue of it was published in 1839, the year of his death, and it is that publication that fixed the stone's name. Everything the object has been called since is derived from a banker's collection catalogue.

The inheritance was contested among his nephews and the stone eventually reached Lord Francis Hope. He held it under a settlement that gave him only a life interest, which meant he could not sell it on his own authority. His financial collapse produced a series of applications to the Court of Chancery for permission to sell, and permission was eventually given in 1901. The sale that followed is usually reported at 29,000 pounds.

That episode is worth more attention than it usually gets, because it is the only point in the object's history at which a court of law examined the title to it and put the examination on the public record. A stone that had been stolen from a national collection was sold, a century later, under the supervision of an English court that was concerned with a family settlement and not with where it had come from.

Cartier, McLean and the sale of a story

The stone passed through New York and Paris dealers in the first decade of the twentieth century. One link in that period is repeated everywhere and is weak: the claim that it was owned by Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire. The catalogue of the 1909 Paris sale at which the Habib collection was dispersed stated expressly that the Hope was one of only two gems in that collection which had never belonged to the Sultan. The claim survives anyway, which is a useful measure of how this object's literature works.

Pierre Cartier sold it to Evalyn Walsh McLean of Washington in 1910 or 1911, in a setting Cartier made, which is substantially the setting it wears now. McLean initially refused it and Cartier reset it; when she subsequently declined to complete, Cartier sued. The dispute was settled and she kept the stone until her death in 1947.

What Cartier sold her, on the evidence, was not only a diamond. The misfortune story was already circulating in the press and Cartier used it. That is the commercial origin of the curse: not a Hindu temple, but a Paris dealer with a difficult client and a stone that needed a reason to be worth the money.

Winston, and the parcel

Harry Winston bought the McLean jewels in 1949, after her death, and showed the Hope for years in his travelling Court of Jewels exhibitions. On 10 November 1958 he gave it to the Smithsonian Institution.

He sent it by post. The stone travelled from New York to Washington in a plain brown paper package as registered first-class mail, insured for one million dollars. The total cost of sending it is recorded at 145.29 dollars, of which 2.44 dollars was the postage and the remainder the insurance. The postman who carried it to the National Museum of Natural History was named James Todd.

The wrapping survives and is itself a photographable object, which is unusual and useful, because it is one of the very few pieces of the Hope's documentary history that can be seen rather than read.

Winston's stated purpose was to seed a national gem collection. That is exactly what happened: the Hope is the anchor of the Smithsonian's gem hall and one of the most visited objects in the United States.

The curse, dated and attributed

The curse is not old. Its components can be dated.

The story that the stone was prised from the eye of a Hindu idol, and that a curse followed the theft, appears in Anglo-American popular writing in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has no seventeenth-century source and Tavernier, who bought the stone and wrote a book about his travels, records nothing of the kind.

The catalogue of misfortunes attached to successive owners was assembled in the press around 1909 to 1911, and a New York Times article of 1911 is among the pieces that set out the list. It was answered at the time: the trade editor T. Edgar Willson pointed out that no ill luck was ever recorded as befalling Eliason, or Hope, or any of their descendants, which is a difficulty the curse literature has never addressed.

Pierre Cartier used the story in selling the stone to Evalyn Walsh McLean around 1910. May Yohe, who had been married to Lord Francis Hope, made a film serial called The Hope Diamond Mystery in 1921 and wrote about the curse thereafter. Between a dealer with an unsold stone and a former owner's wife with a film to promote, the story had two well-motivated publishers within a decade.

The Smithsonian's position is that there is no curse. This record agrees and moves on, with one observation: the curse is the only part of this object's history for which the sources are easy to find, and the documented chain, which is genuinely extraordinary, is the part that takes work.