RAPAPORT... The rarest of the rare, the great colored diamonds of the past lived up to their “fancy” nomenclature, offering flawless beauty, exquisite color and provenance that reads like a page out of the history books. “First of all, these stones have very colorful histories,” says Richard Buonomo, estate jewelry and antique diamond dealer. “They are associated with rulers and monarchs and wars and the ups and downs of economies. When the miners found certain diamonds, they immediately went to the king or queen.” The stones, Buonomo says, were “like a Rembrandt” that would appear “once in a blue moon,” and as soon as one appeared, royalty would take immediate possession of it.
AGELESS ALLURESome of what gives these stones their place in posterity is the provenance, says Lee Siegelson, president and owner of Siegelson, a jewelry house in New York City specializing in fine collectibles. “Any piece of jewelry that has a history and provenance to it, whether it’s romantic or tragic, keeps it in our minds and keeps people wanting to know who owned it, who touched it, especially stones that have passed down from different families, different owners, different buyers. It reminds us that these things are eternal and lasting and they go from generation to generation, from country to world leader and on.” With museum-worthy stones like the Hope Diamond or Dresden Green, the appeal, Siegelson adds, “also does include their size and the color. …I think those factors coming together let them stand the test of time. At the end of the day, people really want to know about them.”
“I think it’s a combination of size and value, provenance and notoriety,” agrees Simon Teakle of Betteridge Jewelers in Greenwich, Connecticut. And also timing, he adds.
“There was a 13.39-carat blue emerald cut that I saw when I was at Christie’s — I think we sold it in 1995 and we got a world record price at the time of $550,000 per carat. If that stone had been found in the nineteenth century, I bet that it would have been a historical stone. Stones aren’t named in the same way today that they were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
People didn’t necessarily collect colored diamonds because they were these super-valuables, says Teakle. “They weren’t investment-type stones; they were for the very rarefied collector who wanted something very, very unusual.” Siegelson agrees that “rarity attracts people.”
“Simply and powerfully stated,” says Buonomo, “a colored diamond combines all the cachet, the hardness, the brilliance, the association with betrothal of a diamond with a rainbow of colors.”
“It is the cachet that it’s a diamond and it has color and it’s so rare and distinguished,” Buonomo goes on to say. “A lot of this comes down to the fact that all people, even those of very modest means, like to distinguish themselves. And a fancy colored diamond offers individuals a great opportunity to distinguish themselves because it is so rare, such a conversation piece.”
“It’s all about color with a colored diamond,” sums up Mona Lee Nesseth, a private jeweler based in Southern California. “Color is more important than clarity. And the value is all based on quality and the depth of the color.”
HISTORIC PERSPECTIVE“I think it’s safe to say colored diamonds up to the third quarter of the twentieth century, certainly post-Second World War, were even more rarefied than they are now,” says Teakle. “In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, you did not have the Australian mines and you did not necessarily have the output of color that you do in South Africa. You were getting a handful from Brazil, a handful from Africa. Not that they are in great quantity today, but they really were less available then — and I’m talking about the blues, the pinks, the greens, the reds and all of that.”
Most of the famous names in historic jewelry were those who had, Teakle says, “the financial wherewithal to purchase these stones. I would say if you look historically at the old, great jewelers who were dealing with them, it was Cartier, Van Cleef and Boucheron. But you didn’t have the specialist colored diamond dealers as you do today.”
The way famous jewelry firms handled the gems was informed by their own different sense of aesthetics, Siegelson adds. And one of the ways that this was expressed was in the cut of the diamond.
“I think you see a lot of it in nineteenth-century jewelry, like the Russian Crown jewels and such,” points out Siegelson, “the beautiful old cushions and old mine cuts. Some irregular pear shapes that have warmth and a sexy illusion to them that people collect and like today — that’s when it started. Every once in a while, you’ll see the cut in Deco, whether it’s Boucheron, or maybe Cartier. Or you’ll see an Asscher cut or a pretty cushion cut used in jewelry, maybe a Belle Epoque pin or brooch that might have a pair of beautiful old blue diamond pear shapes. You see it in the nineteenth century from Belle Epoque to Deco.”
A CUT ABOVE
“The advent of the radiant cut or the use of that type of cutting technique,” points out Siegelson, “has created in terms of the GIA (Gemological Institute of America) grading, much more ‘intenses’ or color that has been improved. But we are selling an item of beauty and, in the end, what we have to ask ourselves is ‘has the aesthetic nature and the beauty of it been improved?’”
“I’ve had some older yellow diamonds that are faceted — almost antique, classic styles,” says Buonomo, “and they very effectively earned the ‘vivid’ appellation from GIA. The faceting here was just a way of bringing out some reflections and making the diamond more symmetrical.” Which is different, he explains, from “a heavily modified, super-complicated radiant cut where, if you saw the crystal, it would barely be a fancy light and somehow it’s been pushed to become vivid.”
One example of an older stone whose cut is as distinguished as its color is an 8.81-carat fancy green-blue briolette that the GIA classified as a rare type IIa “similar to the Dresden.” For the stone’s owner, Nishan Vartanian, Vartanian & Sons, New York City, “the briolette is one of the rarest stones we have ever owned. Not only is the combination of the color and size so unique, but equally important is the elegance of the cut, which you won't find in a modern stone. It typifies the 1920s, which is today one of the best and most sought after periods for gemstones and jewelry.”
In terms of the great stones in the museums, Buonomo says, “the material is imbued with the color through and through. Turn it upside down, look at the sides…probably if you took the facets off the Hope Diamond, you’d still have that exact same midnight-blue hunk of diamond. The great diamonds all have that true body color.”
“I definitely feel gem cutting is an art,” says Siegelson. “Depending on how you look at it, I view some of the great diamonds and even things that are cut today by certain cutters, definitely to be an art. We get these more sophisticated laser machines and computer models to generate how to maximize cutting a piece of rough and all that, but at the end of the day, what I look for and still see is that there is a cutter who is an artisan and if he can improve the color or the clarity, you have to really respect that it is his hand, his aesthetic, his type of feel.
“The stones themselves in their cutting are an art form. The way the Hope is now, the cushion itself is more of an art form that I respect than the piece of jewelry it’s in. I don’t necessarily love the piece of jewelry but I love the sensibility of the cutting and that romantic cushion. Sometimes it goes the other way — it’s a great, great piece of jewelry, but I hate that radiant cut.”
Concludes Siegelson, “When both those things come together, then you really get a great final piece of art.”
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - May 2008. To subscribe click here.