Episode 3: The Cartiers and The Romanovs

About This Talk

When Grand Duchess Vladimir fled Russia, her jewels were still in the palace. Her friend Albert Stopford — suspected of being an English spy — walked back into a city in revolution, dressed as a worker, and made his way to her empty home. He filled two bags with newspapers and hid the Vladimir jewels inside them. Outside, people were being shot in the streets.

Joined by Prince Dimitri — descendant of Catherine the Great and many of the European royal houses, former senior vice president of Sotheby's Jewelry, and author of Once Upon a Diamond — Francesca explores the full arc of Cartier's relationship with Russia and its royal families. The webinar begins in the late 19th century, when the Romanov dynasty was the richest in Europe and Fabergé, not Cartier, was the name on their lips. It traces the Cartier brothers' slow, deliberate campaign to change that: the Christmas bazars in St. Petersburg, the sales agent Paul Cherouse who arrived with a little black book of addresses, and the original letter of invitation to the Dowager Empress written in French, the language of the Russian court. At the centre of the story is Grand Duchess Vladimir — the best Cartier client in Russia, the woman who outshone the Tsarina at court — and the Vladimir tiara, a masterpiece of intertwining circles that ended up, decades later, in the British Royal Family. Prince Dimitri, whose own grandmother appears in family photographs in the presentation, tells the extraordinary story of how the jewels escaped the revolution: Grand Duchess Vladimir fled by boat across the Black Sea while Albert Stopford slipped back into her empty palace dressed as a worker, filled two bags with newspapers to conceal the jewels, and walked out through the chaos of a city in revolution. The webinar closes with what happened next: Jack Cartier travelling to Copenhagen to buy jewels from exiled Romanovs who needed to raise funds, some pieces reappearing at Christie's in 1927, and others discovered ninety years later in two pillowcases that had been sitting, unclaimed, in an attic of the Swedish embassy.