Josephine & Her Jewels: Gifts from Napoleon and Alexander I — Where They Disappeared

[00:00:00]It started with a ring so modest that historians spent decades wondering if it was even real. Two pear-shaped stones, one sapphire, one diamond, each just under a carat, facing each other on a slim gold band. The man who gave it was 26 years old, almost completely broke, and bitterly opposed by his own family for the match. The woman who received it was a widow, six years his senior, with two children from her first marriage.

[00:00:31]217 years later, that ring sold at auction in Fontainebleau for nearly $1 million. The jewels of The jewels of Empress Josephine don't hold together as a collection. They were scattered at her death, sold off in secret during her lifetime, carried across oceans by fleeing empresses, poned for war loans in London, reset by Fabergé in St. Petersburg, and bought by Texans. What connects them is the woman who wore them, and a man so obsessed with her that his letters became historical embarrassments. He spent fortunes. He built an empire. He still got the divorce.

[00:01:13]Welcome back to Jewelry Pleasure. If this is your first time here, this channel is for everyone who believes that jewelry is history you can hold.

[00:01:22]Today, we're following Josephine's treasures from a broke general's pocket across three continents and two centuries. Subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss what comes next.

[00:01:40]Napoleon Bonaparte proposed to Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie in January 1796.

[00:01:48]He had almost nothing to offer her. His salary as a general was in arrears. His family thought the match humiliating.

[00:01:57]She was a Caribbean-born widow, older than him, with debts of her own. But he was infatuated in a way his letters make painful to read, and the ring he gave her was exactly as extravagant as he could manage at the time. A yellow gold band set with two pear-shaped stones, a sapphire and a diamond, facing each other in the toi et moi style. You and me.

[00:02:21]Each stone weighed just under a carat.

[00:02:24]They married on the 9th of March, 1796.

[00:02:31]Two days later, Napoleon left to take command of the Army of Italy. The ring stayed in Bonaparte family hands for more than two centuries. Josephine passed it to her daughter Hortense, Queen of Holland. Hortense passed it to her son, who became Napoleon III, whose wife Empress Eugenie wore it, and who gave it onward by descent until in March 2013, the Osenat auction house in Fontainebleau listed it with an estimate of 10,000 euros to 15,000 euros. The final hammer price was 730,000 euros.

[00:03:09]The auctioneer, Emily Villaine, told journalists afterward, "In my wildest dreams, I did not think we would outsell the estimate by more than 47 times."

[00:03:20]With the buyer's premium, the ring cleared the equivalent of US $1.17 million. The buyer has never been identified.

[00:03:30]The sapphire and diamond are still just under a carat each. What changed was everything else.

[00:03:45]The Coronation Tiara, a beautiful lie.

[00:03:49]For most of the 20th century, there was one image that said Josephine at her coronation more powerfully than any other.

[00:03:57]A sweeping yellow gold diadem set with 1,040 diamonds weighing approximately 260 carats in total, mounted in cascading laurel and palmette motifs.

[00:04:08]Van Cleef & Arpels had acquired it in the late 1940s and displayed it as the piece the Empress wore at Notre Dame on the 2nd of December, 1804, the day Napoleon crowned himself and then turned to crown her.

[00:04:35]Jacques Arpels went on French television and said it plainly, "You see the diadem in the vitrine behind me. I bought it at the end of World War II from an aristocratic English lady. It's the one that Empress Josephine wore on the day of her coronation."

[00:04:55]Princess Grace of Monaco wore it at the Monte Carlo Centenary Ball on the 27th of May, 1966.

[00:05:04]A perfect provenance.

[00:05:06]Cinematic.

[00:05:08]Unimpeachable.

[00:05:14]Then the historians arrived. Bernard Morel, author of the authoritative study The French Crown Jewels, checked the 1804 and 1814 inventories of Josephine's private jewels. No tiara matching this description appears in either. The only diamond tiara documented as delivered by her jeweler Nitot in 1807 contained 2,882 diamonds, not 1,040.

[00:05:43]Serge Grandjean, former head of the Louvre's d'art department, looked at the downward-pointing central spike and said it was incompatible with the style of the Napoleonic time.

[00:05:55]In 2019, Vincent Meylan's research suggested the side ornaments might be early 19th century joined to a central element made much later. Van Cleef & Arpels has since sold the tiara to an undisclosed buyer. The diamond diadem that Princess Grace wore, the one Jacques Arpels called the coronation crown of Josephine, is, as the jewel historian Vincent Meylan concluded, unlikely to be anything more than partially original. We don't know what Josephine actually wore to her coronation.

[00:06:30]The David painting shows a tiara. The inventories don't match it to anything that has survived. That's the honest answer.

[00:06:45]The wheat sheaf tiara, Nitot's signature. On the 15th of July, 1804, 8 weeks after the proclamation of the Empire and 5 months before the coronation, Josephine appeared at the Great Legion d'Honneur ceremony at the Invalides in Paris. It was her first official public appearance as sovereign. Madame de Rémusat was there and wrote it down. She appeared in broad daylight attired in a robe of rose-colored tulle spangled with silver stars and cut very low. Her headdress consisted of a great number of diamond wheat ears.

[00:07:23]The wheat motif was everywhere in Empire design, symbol of fertility, abundance, and Ceres, the goddess of the harvest.

[00:07:32]But Mellerio and Nitot, who had been Napoleon's official jeweler since 1802, made it distinctly Josephine's.

[00:07:40]The surviving wheat sheaf tiara, made around 1811 by Nitot and his son François Regnault, takes the form of nine stalks of wheat set with more than 66 carats of old cut diamonds in gold and silver. It's not overwhelming in size. What it does is concentrate the motif into something almost botanical, elegant in the way things are when they look like they grew rather than were assembled. Nitot himself died in 1809, but the firm he founded outlasted the empire, the restoration, the July monarchy, the Second Empire, and two World Wars. In 1885, it was acquired by Joseph Chaumet. In 2011, Chaumet bought the wheat sheaf tiara back and placed it in the heritage collection. One of the oldest objects in a house that considers itself the living descendant of the woman who wore it.

[00:08:40]The malachite cameo parure, a gift that tells its own story. When it was acquired by collector Marshall Lapair at Sotheby's New York in 1979 and donated to the Fondation Napoléon, the full extent of this parure was finally documented. Two necklaces, a pair of bracelets, a diadem, a brooch, a pendant, six pins, and a belt. Each piece set with malachite cameos carved with Greek gods surrounded by natural pearls in yellow gold and tortoise shell mounts, all fitting together in a red Morocco case. The case bears a crowned A.

[00:09:24]That monogram belongs not to Josephine, but to Augusta Amelie of Bavaria, vicereine of Italy and Josephine's daughter-in-law. And there is another clue. The central brooch cameo appears to be a portrait of Josephine herself.

[00:09:39]You would not wear a brooch of your own face as everyday jewelry, which strongly suggests this parure was made as a gift, something Josephine commissioned from Nitot around 1810 to give to Augusta, and then never wore herself. It sat in the Fondation Napoléon for decades before being brought out for the 2021 Josephine and Napoleon exhibition at 12 Place Vendôme, displayed alongside Chaumet's meatier pieces and documented parure fragments.

[00:10:08]A near-complete Empire parure is extraordinarily rare. Most were broken up, recut, reset, or sold in pieces over the course of the 19th century. This one survived intact because it was a gift, and the recipient kept it together.

[00:10:36]The Leuchtenberg Emerald Parure, Paris to Rio to Oslo.

[00:10:42]No jewel in this story has traveled further or carried more weight. The Leuchtenberg Emerald Parure, a suite of emeralds and diamonds attributed to Nitot, made in France in the early 19th century, was bequeathed by Josephine to her son Eugène de Beauharnais. Eugène gave it to his wife Augusta of Bavaria, and in 1829, Augusta gave it to her daughter Amélie on the occasion of Amélie's marriage to Emperor Pedro I of Brazil. The emeralds and diamonds may have been chosen deliberately, green and yellow, echoing the colors of the Brazilian Imperial flag. Amélie had never met her husband before she arrived in Rio de Janeiro on the 15th of October, 1829.

[00:11:29]She was 17. He was 31, a widower with a young empire and a difficult personality. Her nuptial blessing in Rio, at which she wore the emeralds, was painted by the French artist Jean Baptiste Debret.

[00:11:45]Pedro abdicated Brazil's throne in 1831 in favor of their 5-year-old son Pedro II. The couple sailed to Europe and Pedro launched a war for his daughter Maria II's Portuguese throne. A bloody campaign that has gone down in history as the Liberal Wars. During that campaign, the Leuchtenberg Emerald Parure was put in pawn in London as collateral for a war loan alongside the Braganza Tiara.

[00:12:16]Pedro's faction won. The jewels were redeemed. Pedro himself died of tuberculosis in 1834, leaving Amelie a widow at 22.

[00:12:29]She spent the next 39 years in Lisbon.

[00:12:33]When she died in 1873, she bequeathed the Parure to her sister Queen Josephine of Sweden and Norway, to the considerable disappointment of the Portuguese royal family, who had expected to inherit it. It passed through Queen Sophia of Nassau, Princess Ingeborg, who removed two emeralds to make earrings and replaced them with diamond palmettes, and in 1940 to Crown Princess Martha of Norway.

[00:12:59]Martha was carrying the Parure when she fled German-occupied Norway wrapped in a scarf. Her mother had given it to her as a life insurance, something to be sold one emerald at a time if she needed to survive in exile. She never sold any of it.

[00:13:16]>> [music] >> Today, the Parure is worn by Queen Sonja of Norway, who chose it for the 2012 Ruby Jubilee dinner of Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and for the 1984 French state to Norway, returning the emeralds in a way to the country where they were made.

[00:13:34]A note for accuracy, Norwegian royal historian Trond Noren Isaksen has argued that the Josephine provenance for this parure is a legend invented in the 1950s and that neither the 1804 nor the 1814 inventories of Josephine's estate match its description. What is certain is that it belonged to Augusta of Leuchtenberg.

[00:13:56]Whether it was Josephine's before that is, honestly, unverified.

[00:14:05]The Leuchtenberg sapphire parure, what Augusta's letter changed.

[00:14:13]For years, the standard story was romantic and simple.

[00:14:17]Napoleon gave a spectacular sapphire parure to Augusta of Bavaria as a wedding gift when she married his stepson Eugene de Beauharnais in January 1806.

[00:14:28]It made a good story. Royals in Scandinavia repeated it. Books repeated it.

[00:14:36]Then a Swedish documentary team found a letter. In February 1811, Augusta wrote home to Bavaria describing the gift she had received for the birth of her son.

[00:14:48]For the birth of my son, I received extraordinary wonderful gifts. Also, the Empress sent to me a set in sapphires and diamonds and the emperor elevated my son over the baptism and he became August Napoleon.

[00:15:03]The Empress was Josephine.

[00:15:05]The occasion was the birth of Augusta's son August Napoleon on the 9th of December, 1810.

[00:15:13]The parure wasn't a wedding gift from Napoleon. It was a birth gift from Josephine five years later. Jewel historian Claudia Tomet Witt, whose research appeared in the Swedish documentary Kungliga Smycken, is responsible for this revision. The original romance, Napoleon presenting sapphires to a new daughter-in-law, is gone. What remains is arguably more interesting. Josephine, by then divorced from Napoleon and living at Malmaison, still generous, still maintaining her family connections, still spending what she had. The parure passed in 1823 to Augusta's daughter Josephine of Leuchtenberg on her marriage to the future Oscar I of Sweden, and it has been in Swedish hands ever since. Queen Victoria of Sweden willed it to the Bernadotte Family Foundation in 1930, deciding it was too significant to risk passing by individual inheritance. Every Swedish queen since has worn it for state occasions and Nobel ceremonies.

[00:16:18]Queen Silvia, who has worn it more than any other living queen, described the tiara in the documentary. "It's very easy to wear and is not at all heavy.

[00:16:31]You can pick up the form you like best.

[00:16:33]You can have it half open like a diadem or opt for a crown-like setting.

[00:16:39]Eleven deep blue rectangular sapphires across a base of diamond honeysuckle leaves. Josephine picked them out for a grandchild she adored. That child is long gone. The sapphires are not.

[00:17:29]>> The Cameo Parures, Ancient Stones, and a Collector's Obsession.

[00:17:36]Josephine's obsession with carved ancient gems started in Italy. In 1796 and 1797, following Napoleon's campaigns through the peninsula, she bought coral and cameos in Naples, mosaics and intaglios in Rome, and received more as gifts from generals and courtiers who understood that presenting her with antiquities was a reliable route to the general's goodwill.

[00:18:01]Her sister-in-law Caroline Bonaparte Murat, who became Queen of Naples in 1808 and was the most serious antiquities collector in the family, gave her several particularly fine pieces. Josephine's deep education came from Dominique Vivant Denon, the scholar adventurer who directed the Musée Napoléon and taught her to distinguish hard stones, recognize mythological subjects, and evaluate engraving quality. She became, in the words of Sotheby's specialist Diana Scarisbrick, the person who pulled cameos out of the collector's cabinet and put them on bodies.

[00:18:38]Within a decade, every fashionable woman in Regency Europe wanted one.

[00:18:44]In the winter of 2021, two of her cameo parures came to auction at Sotheby's London. Their provenance trail ran through Josephine to possibly acquired from the Empress or her estate by Lord Edward Boles Lascelles, a wealthy English collector who made repeated buying trips to post-revolutionary Paris, and who died in June 1814, just days after Josephine died at Malmaison. Then by Lascelles family descent for two centuries. One per raw, a carnelian intaglio set by Jacques Ambroise Oliveras around 1805, had been on long-term loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum for almost 100 years before being sold. It realized 450,600 pounds, more than double its high estimate.

[00:19:34]The second, a five cameo gold diadem with belt clasp and ornament depicting Medusa, Zeus, Pan, Bacchus, and Gaia nursing a child, realized 126,000 pounds. Combined, the two lots cleared the equivalent of roughly a $763,000.

[00:19:55]Both buyers remain anonymous.

[00:19:59]The word tradition appears in every Sotheby's catalog entry for Josephine attributed pieces. Tradition means, we believe this, we have reason to believe this, but the paperwork is thin. Her jewels were sold privately during her lifetime, brokered through her children, dispersed without documentation.

[00:20:21]She kept no proper inventory. For the most important collection of the Napoleonic age, the silence in the records is almost total.

[00:20:44]The Empress Josephine Tiara, from a Tsar's hands to Texas. In late April 1814, with Napoleon exiled to Elba and the Russian army occupying Paris, Tsar Alexander the first began calling at Malmaison.

[00:21:02]The 1860s painting by Hector Viger in the Malmaison collection imagines one of these visits. Josephine in her garden, the Tsar tall and attentive beside her.

[00:21:13]Their relationship was one of genuine fascination on both sides. During one of his visits, Alexander presented her with a cache of briolette cut diamonds, elongated multi-faceted drops that catch light at every angle. It is plausible that the gift was related to a transaction happening at the same time.

[00:21:34]Alexander was buying old master paintings from Josephine's collection.

[00:21:39]Those paintings are still in the Hermitage today.

[00:21:44]Days after hosting him at a grand dinner at Malmaison, Josephine caught a chill during an outdoor ride at Hortense's chateau. She never recovered. She died of pneumonia on the 29th of May, 1814, aged 50.

[00:22:01]Napoleon, on Elba, locked himself in his rooms for 2 days when the news arrived.

[00:22:07]After Waterloo, traveling to his final exile on Saint Helena, he stopped at Malmaison and visited her grave.

[00:22:19]On his deathbed on the 5th of May, 1821, according to General de Montholon's memoir, his last words included her name, "France, army, tête d'armée, Josephine."

[00:22:32]Montholon, it should be said, is the only eyewitness who records it that way.

[00:22:38]The accounts of Bertrand and Marchand, considered by historians more reliable, do not mention her name at all.

[00:22:46]Whether he said it or not, the story has clung to him for 200 years.

[00:22:53]The Tsar's briolettes passed to Josephine's son Eugene, and after Eugene's death in 1824, they moved deeper into Russian royal life. His son Maximilian, third Duke of Leuchtenberg, married Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, eldest daughter of Tsar Nicholas I, in 1839.

[00:23:12]Around 1890, the Leuchtenberg-Romanov family commissioned August Holmström, head jeweler of Fabergé in St. Petersburg, to mount the stones into a tiara, a small, precisely structured piece just 13.2 cm wide.

[00:23:28]Graduated arches of old-cut diamonds, knife-edge collet spaces, and at the center a pear-shaped diamond flanked by three briolette drops and one old-cut stone. After the Russian Revolution scattered the Leuchtenbergs, the tiara surfaced in Switzerland, where King Albert I of Belgium bought it from a dealer in Vevey for his wife, Queen Elizabeth. It passed to their son, Prince Charles Theodore, then to his sister, Queen Maria José, last Queen of Italy, then to her daughter, Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy. On the 12th of June, 2007, Christie's London offered it as lot 41 with an estimate of £400,000 to £600,000.

[00:24:11]It sold for £1,050,400, roughly US $2,071,389.

[00:24:21]The buyers were Artie and Dorothy McFerrin, Texan collectors of Fabergé.

[00:24:26]The tiara is now on permanent display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, staged in a case that lets visitors who lean forward see it reflected, as if placed on their own heads. It started as a gift from a Russian emperor to a French empress who died 3 weeks later.

[00:24:44]It is now in Texas.

[00:24:49]There's no Josephine Collection.

[00:24:52]There's no museum that holds more than a piece or two.

[00:24:56]What exists is a kind of scatter, a ring in an anonymous buyer's possession, a tiara in Houston, sapphires in Stockholm, emeralds in Oslo, cameos that spent a century in the V&A with no one quite sure whose they were.

[00:25:18]Josephine herself spent the last years of her life quietly selling pieces to cover debts she never stopped accumulating. She sold in secret through her children without paperwork. She died surrounded by roses she'd collected from around the world in the house that had been her refuge and left an estate that was almost half jewelry, 11 million francs in total, most of it in stones.

[00:25:44]Napoleon stopped at her grave on his way to Saint Helena. He stopped. Whatever he said at the end, he went back to her grave first. Subscribe to Jewelry Pleasure and leave a comment. Which piece surprised you? See you in the next video.