A Royal Pink Diamond Triples Its Estimate: The Marie-Therese Pink at Christie's New York

On 17 June 2025 at Christie's Magnificent Jewels in New York, held at Rockefeller Center, the Marie-Therese Pink sold for US$13,980,000, premium-inclusive, the catalogue title The Marie-Therese Pink Diamond. A historic JAR colored diamond ring. The estimate was US$3,000,000 to US$5,000,000. The result was roughly 2.8 times the high estimate, and it set two world auction records: the highest price for a fancy purple-pink diamond, and the highest for a jewel by JAR.

This season's results highlight the tremendous demand for jewels of exceptional rarity, provenance, and craftsmanship. Rahul Kadakia, Christie's International Head of Jewelry

The stone: a fancy purple-pink modified kite brilliant-cut diamond of 10.38 carats, mounted by JAR, Joel Arthur Rosenthal, in a ring in blackened platinum with a fleur-de-lis motif of small round colorless diamonds. A crest on the peak of the kite-shaped gem resembles both a crown and a fleur-de-lis. GIA's pre-sale evaluation reported the stone cut in a modified kite brilliant style, likely originated in India in the mid-1700s, with the color origin and internal characteristics confirmed by the institute.

Documented provenance, and the lore beside it

The documented provenance begins with Marie-Therese, Duchess of Angouleme, the only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The stone passed from her to her niece, the Duchess of Chambord, and then to Maria Theresa of Bavaria, who listed it in her will as a pink solitaire diamond from Aunt Chambord. The stone is believed to have been set in a gold and silver hairpin around 1868; the hairpin and its velvet case, stamped with the imperial warrant of the court jeweler A. E. Kochert, were included in the auction lot. It was sold by descendants of the Bavarian royal family at Sotheby's Geneva in 1996, and had been off the market since.

Royal lore holds that Marie Antoinette entrusted her most treasured jewels to her coiffeur Leonard Autie on the eve of her failed 1791 escape from Paris, and that they passed to her surviving daughter. Christie's own framing is explicit that this is not known for certain, describing it as likely that this diamond was part of this inheritance. Any claim of direct Marie Antoinette ownership remains unconfirmed, and the lot's value rested on what is documented, not what is hoped.

A white-glove sale

The ring led a sale in which all 138 lots sold, 100 percent by lot, for a total of US$87.7 million, the highest result ever for a various-owner jewellery auction at Christie's in the Americas. It was Christie's second white-glove jewellery sale of 2025, after the 100-percent-sold Geneva Magnificent Jewels sale in May at US$72.4 million. The sale's second highlight was the Blue Belle, a 392.52-carat sapphire necklace that sold for US$11.3 million within its US$8 to 12 million estimate.

Private collections in the sale included Color and Ingenuity: The Collection of Lucille Coleman, featuring a Van Cleef and Arpels Mystery Set ruby and diamond brooch that set a world auction record for a Mystery Set jewel at US$1,562,500; the jewellery collection of Anne H. Bass at US$8.8 million; and Magnificent Mughal Jewels: Property from a Royal Collection at US$14.8 million.

The Marie-Therese Pink is the clearest 2025 data point for one proposition: provenance plus a strong contemporary mounting is worth a substantial premium. The stone waited from 1996 for the market to catch up with its history. In June 2025, reset in blackened platinum by the most discreet maker in contemporary jewellery, it did not so much sell as detonate.

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