Evalyn Walsh McLean (1 August 1886 – 26 April 1947) was the American mining heiress who became the owner of the Hope Diamond, purchased from Pierre Cartier on 28 January 1911 for $180,000. The transaction is one of the most frequently cited episodes in the history of the luxury gem trade, and it tied the Hope Diamond's already layered provenance directly to the Cartier name.
Background
McLean was born in Leadville, Colorado, the daughter of Thomas Walsh, an Irish immigrant prospector who discovered the Camp Bird gold mine near Ouray, Colorado, and sold it in the early 1900s for around $5 million. The family moved to Washington, D.C. and lived among the city's political and social elite. In 1908 she married Edward Beale "Ned" McLean, heir to the publishing fortune that owned the Washington Post and the Cincinnati Enquirer. The couple became Washington society fixtures and hosted lavish parties at their estate, Friendship.
The Hope Diamond sale
The 45.52-carat fancy dark greyish blue diamond, originally from the Kollur mine in Golconda, India, had a history of ownership that stretched back to the seventeenth century. It had been part of the French Crown Jewels (cut down from the larger Tapy "French Blue" after the 1792 revolutionary theft) before passing through several private collectors in the nineteenth century. Pierre Cartier bought it in 1910 and had it reset in a new pendant mount for McLean. A dispute arose between the McLeans and Cartier over the terms of the sale, settled the following year.
McLean also owned the 94-carat Star of the East diamond and wore both stones regularly. Her appetite for significant gems was as much part of her public persona as the Washington parties.
Tragedy and the curse legend
Journalism of the period attached the Hope Diamond's supposed "curse" to the disasters that followed in McLean's life: her eldest son Vinson was struck and killed by a car in 1919 at the age of nine; Ned McLean struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal, was declared legally insane, and died in a psychiatric hospital in 1941; her daughter Evalyn died of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills in 1946, aged twenty-four. In 1932 McLean had given $100,000 to the con-man Gaston B. Means, believing he could help recover the kidnapped Lindbergh baby; Means was convicted and imprisoned.
Death and the Smithsonian
McLean died of pneumonia on 26 April 1947 at the age of sixty. Her jewellery collection, including the Hope Diamond and the Star of the East, was bought from her estate by the New York jeweller Harry Winston in 1949. Winston toured the Hope Diamond as part of his "Court of Jewels" travelling exhibition (1949-1953) before donating it to the Smithsonian Institution on 10 November 1958. It entered the National Museum of Natural History as Specimen #217868, where it remains on permanent display.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019)
- Wikipedia: Evalyn Walsh McLean
- Wikipedia: Hope Diamond
- Smithsonian Institution: History of the Hope Diamond
- Encyclopedia.com: McLean, Evalyn Walsh (1886-1947)
- FBI History: Lindbergh Kidnapping
