Episode 4: The Cartiers and Marjorie Merriweather Post

About This Talk

When Maisie Plant walked into Cartier's New York showroom, she fell in love with the most expensive pearl necklace in the world — valued at one million dollars. Her husband happened to own a Fifth Avenue mansion worth exactly the same. Pierre Cartier and Morton Plant agreed on a swap: Mrs. Plant got the pearls, Cartier got the keys. When cultured pearls later collapsed the natural pearl market, the necklace became worth a fraction of its original price. The building, today, is priceless.

Recorded live at Hillwood Estate in Washington DC — where over 130 Cartier pieces from Marjorie Merriweather Post's collection are permanently displayed — Francesca is joined by Wilfried, curator at Hillwood and authority on French and Russian decorative arts, for a portrait of the Cartiers' greatest American client. Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887–1973), heiress to the Post cereal fortune and one of the wealthiest women in America, bought from Cartier for more than four decades. The webinar traces both sides of that relationship: Pierre Cartier's extraordinary effort to conquer the American market — from the 1909 Fifth Avenue opening to the legendary salesman Jules Glaenzer, who gave over 200 parties a year and sold jewels from his jacket pockets — and Marjorie's own evolution as a collector, from her earliest Art Deco pieces to the great Indian emerald brooch, weighing 250 carats of Mughal-carved stone, that she wore as a shoulder brooch in a portrait of 1929. The webinar follows Marjorie through Palm Beach and her yacht the Sea Cloud, to London and the Ritz, where she acquired diamond earrings once said to have belonged to a French queen and later to the Yusupov family — sold by a princess who had fled the Russian Revolution and needed to raise funds. It visits Soviet Russia in 1937, when Marjorie arrived as the wife of Ambassador Joseph Davies and began acquiring the imperial treasures that a ransacked empire was selling off — including, eventually, the bridal diamond crown of Empress Alexandra, the only one of its kind outside Russia. The webinar closes at Hillwood itself, where Marjorie's collection — jewels, Fabergé eggs, Romanov portraits, Cartier frames — has been open to the public since 1977.