Princess Margaret (1930-2002), younger daughter of King George VI and younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, was among the royal clients who maintained Cartier London's connection to the British Crown through the postwar decades. Her name is associated with several pieces from the firm's work under Jean-Jacques Cartier, who ran the London branch from the late 1950s into the 1970s.
The panther brooch
Among the pieces connected to Princess Margaret is a panther brooch, one of the series of jewelled animal studies that had become among the most recognisable of Cartier's mid-century jewellery. A photograph shows Jean-Jacques Cartier presenting the brooch to the Princess and Lord Snowdon at 175 New Bond Street; in the photograph, Margaret wears a diamond and ruby flower brooch and carries a snakeskin Cartier bag.
The Halo tiara and the 1953 coronation
For the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, high jewellery taxes made large purchases prohibitive for most British residents. Coronation guests, for the most part, wore existing jewels or borrowed from others. Princess Margaret wore her sister's Halo tiara, a piece originally acquired in 1936 with a cascading scroll design. The photograph record of the tiara shows four royal generations wearing it: Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (then Queen Consort) in 1937, Princess Margaret in 1958, and subsequent wearers.
The wider royal connection
Princess Margaret's relationship with Cartier sits within the broader pattern of British royal family connections that the London branch had built from the time of Queen Alexandra and Edward VII. By the time Margaret was acquiring pieces in the 1950s and 1960s, Cartier London's position as a jeweller with deep royal associations was well established, and the client relationship was one of long standing rather than new cultivation.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 10 ("Cousins in Austerity, 1945-1956") and subsequent chapters
