The Patiala Necklace was commissioned from Cartier Paris by Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala, then at the height of his extravagance as one of the wealthiest rulers in the Indian subcontinent. The commission began in 1925 and was completed in 1928, a timeline consistent with the scale of the undertaking. It was executed on a scale that was exceptional even by the standards of Cartier's maharaja work.
The Original Necklace
The necklace was constructed in five rows of graduated diamond links. It originally contained 2,930 diamonds, incorporating stones from the Patiala treasury alongside gems specifically acquired for the commission. The centrepiece stone was the De Beers No. 1, a yellow diamond of 234.6 carats and the seventh-largest diamond in the world at the time, alongside Burmese rubies and further diamonds set in the connecting links.
It was an object designed for ceremonial occasions and court display, to be worn over formal robes in the tradition of Indian royal jewellery. The scale was deliberate: Bhupinder Singh used jewellery as an expression of dynastic power and personal magnificence.
Disappearance
After Bhupinder Singh's death in 1938, the necklace passed into the Patiala treasury. During the upheavals around Indian independence in 1947 and the subsequent integration of the princely states into the Republic of India, much of the Patiala treasury was dispersed. The necklace disappeared from documentation and was believed lost.
Partial Recovery
Decades later, pieces of the original necklace began to surface. Cartier's restoration team tracked some components through specialist dealers and auction records. A number of original diamond links from the necklace were eventually found in a second-hand shop in London, reportedly by chance during a buying trip. The De Beers No. 1 stone resurfaced at a Sotheby's auction in Geneva in 1982, where it received a top bid of $3.16 million but did not meet its reserve. Its present whereabouts remain undisclosed, and several other major elements of the original necklace have not been recovered.
Cartier undertook a partial restoration of the necklace, reconstructing what was possible from recovered original components and using a replica to stand in for the De Beers stone. The restored version, an approximation of the original structure with some original links, has appeared in exhibitions and press coverage.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 4 (“Jacques, 1906–1919”) and ch. 7 (“Precious London: Late 1920s”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), pp. 155, 169 et al.
- V&A Museum, London, “Cartier” exhibition (April–November 2025): featured necklace, Cartier Paris, special order, 1928, for Sir Bhupindra Singh, Maharaja of Patiala
- Wikipedia: Patiala Diamond Necklace
