The Hope Diamond: 45.52 Carats of Boron Blue
The most famous diamond in the world has been at the Smithsonian since Harry Winston donated it in 1958. Its blue comes from boron, its setting history runs through Cartier, and its paper trail starts with Tavernier in the seventeenth century.
The Hope Diamond is a 45.52-carat deep-blue diamond, and since 1958 it has belonged to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the gift of its last private owner, the jeweller Harry Winston. It is the most visited object in the museum's gem collection, and arguably the most famous single gemstone in the world.
The Hope Diamond is the most famous gemstone in the world. It is prized as one of Earth's unique creations and beloved for its beauty. Jeffrey Post, Smithsonian curator
The blue is chemistry. The Smithsonian attributes the colour to light interacting with a trace impurity of the element boron in the diamond's atomic structure. The stone formed more than a billion years ago, some ninety miles below the Earth's surface, and was carried up by a volcanic eruption. It was discovered in the seventeenth century in a mine in Golconda, India.
Tavernier to Louis XIV
In 1668 the French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier sold the diamond to King Louis XIV of France. During the French Revolution it was stolen, and its subsequent owners included King George IV of England and Henry Philip Hope, the London banker whose name it carries today. The Smithsonian's account is explicit about this chain: Tavernier, Louis XIV, theft in the Revolution, George IV, Hope, and finally Winston.
The Cartier setting
Since 1912 the diamond has been mounted in a platinum setting by Cartier, surrounded by sixteen white pear-shaped and cushion-cut diamonds and suspended from a chain containing forty-five diamonds. In 2009, to mark fifty years at the museum, the stone was shown briefly as a stand-alone gem with no setting at all, the first time the public had seen it unset, before returning to the historic Cartier mount.
The Hope's fame rests on documentation rather than legend. The weight, the boron blue, the 1958 donation and the Cartier setting are all matters of museum record. The curse stories are not.
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