Queen Mary:
A pattern,
made personal.

The auction house traces the design to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee necklace, made by Carrington & Co. and presented in 1888. According to its account, Queen Mary later asked Hennell to create a closely related necklace for her own collection. The 1928 commission kept the distinctive arrangement while introducing changes in materials and detail.

Phillips identifies cultured pearls and platinum in Mary’s version, replacing the natural pearls and gold of the Victorian original. It also notes the omission of the small crown above the central quatrefoil. The relationship between the two jewels therefore involves more than a repeated outline: a familiar design was interpreted through a new commission, with choices that made the second necklace distinct.

The oblique detail makes the framework particularly rewarding to examine. The motifs overlap in depth, with pearls projecting beyond the diamond-set edges. A frontal view gathers those elements into a coherent pattern; from an angle, the individual units become more apparent. The necklace has a thickness and a sequence of connections that its symmetrical silhouette can easily conceal.

Its central area also invites a slower reading. The quatrefoil gives the design a recognisable focus, and the pearl beneath it lengthens the composition downwards. Around that centre, the surrounding motifs step towards smaller forms. The result is both repetitive and graduated: enough repetition to establish continuity, enough change to give the middle greater emphasis.

The current catalogue adds an important qualification: the necklace has been slightly altered from its original design. It does not identify the precise alteration in the public lot description. The present photographs show the object offered today; they cannot, by themselves, establish which detail changed or when. That boundary is part of reading an older jewel carefully, alongside appreciation of its appearance.

One small wording detail deserves the same care. Phillips records a case signed Hennell. That refers to the presentation case and should not become a claim that the necklace itself bears a maker’s signature. With a jewel whose appeal includes its history, the distinction between the object, its accompanying material and the catalogue’s account remains useful.

Phillips’ provenance narrative follows the necklace from Queen Mary to her niece, Mary Cambridge Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, and then to a sale in 1986 and subsequent private collections. That history belongs to this Hennell version. The celebrated necklace worn by Elizabeth II at the State Opening of Parliament in 1952 was Victoria’s original, a separate object sharing the underlying design.

Keeping those identities clear makes the later necklace more interesting. Its story concerns a collector’s decision to commission a familiar royal pattern for her own jewellery collection. The second version has its own materials, its own passage through owners and its own present condition. The association with the earlier design supplies context, while the particular object carries the history being offered at this sale.

The modern portrait introduces another kind of continuity. Against black clothing and a warm red background, the necklace retains the clear hierarchy visible in the complete product photograph. The eye still finds the central drop, then moves out through the smaller motifs. A different setting changes the atmosphere around the jewel without removing the design’s ability to organise attention.

The fabric is broad and sculptural, the necklace intricate and graduated. Together they offer a convincing image of how an inherited visual language can occupy a contemporary picture. This is an auction-house presentation, rather than evidence of historical royal wearing. Its value here is visual: it allows the reader to see the jewel beyond a white-ground catalogue image, in relation to clothing, skin and the frame of a portrait.

Before the sale, the necklace can be understood through those different views. The whole establishes its drawing, the detail reveals its construction, and the body gives it scale. Provenance adds another dimension, provided the histories of the two versions stay distinct. What remains is a jewel with both continuity and individuality: a familiar pattern, commissioned again, and carried forward through a life of its own.