Evalyn Walsh McLean (1886 to 1947) was the daughter of the gold prospector Thomas Walsh, who struck the Camp Bird vein in Colorado in 1896, and was for thirty-six years the owner of the Hope Diamond. Her career as a collector spanned the high years of the American Gilded Age and the changes the Depression imposed upon it, and her gem holdings were among the most celebrated in the United States during her lifetime.

The Walsh fortune and early collecting

Thomas Walsh sold the Camp Bird mine in 1902 for approximately five million dollars, an extraordinary sum at the time, and moved his family to Washington, D.C., where they built a sixty-room mansion at 2020 Massachusetts Avenue (the building now houses the Indonesian embassy). Evalyn was given an unrestricted education, including travel to Europe, and acquired her first significant gemstone, a 92.50-carat pear-shaped Star of the East diamond, on her honeymoon in Paris in 1908.

Her marriage to Edward Beale McLean, heir to the Washington Post and Cincinnati Enquirer fortunes, gave her the financial scope and the social position to assemble a collection at the highest level. The McLeans purchased gems primarily from Pierre Cartier in Paris and New York, and from Harry Winston in his early career.

The Hope Diamond

Cartier sold Evalyn the Hope Diamond in 1911. The diamond, a 45.52-carat fancy deep grayish-blue cushion antique brilliant of Type IIb, has a documented provenance reaching back to the seventeenth century when it was acquired in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and sold to Louis XIV. After being recut following the theft from the French crown jewels during the Revolution, it appeared in London by 1812 and was acquired by Henry Philip Hope, from whom it takes its name. Cartier had bought the stone from the estate of the Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman Empire.

The price negotiated was 180,000 dollars, paid over time. Pierre Cartier, in correspondence held in the Cartier archives and reproduced in subsequent histories, deliberately emphasised the supposed curse on the stone in his pitch to McLean, knowing that the romance would appeal to her. McLean wore the Hope as a daily ornament, sometimes loose in her handbag and famously around the neck of her Great Dane on at least one occasion. She was unmoved by the curse stories.

The Hope is a Type IIb diamond, the rare class of diamonds containing boron impurities that produce blue colour and electrical semiconductivity. The Smithsonian, which has owned the stone since 1958, has subjected it to detailed scientific analysis published in Gems and Gemology and elsewhere. The stone displays a strong red phosphorescence under shortwave ultraviolet light that persists for several seconds after exposure, a characteristic that has been used to confirm the identity of historical Type IIb stones in subsequent research.

Other significant pieces

McLean's collection extended well beyond the Hope. The 94.80-carat Star of the East, an antique pear-cut with Indian provenance, remained in the collection until her death. She owned an emerald and diamond pendant brooch by Cartier set with a 34.95-carat Colombian emerald, and a substantial collection of natural pearls. Her Cartier suite of carved emeralds and diamond, made in 1923, exemplifies the Indian-influenced design current at the firm in that period.

Personal context and decline

McLean's life was marked by repeated tragedy. Her son Vinson, called the hundred-million-dollar baby in the contemporary press, died at nine years of age in a traffic accident outside the family home. Her daughter Evalyn married Senator Robert Reynolds and died in 1946 of a sleeping pill overdose. Her marriage to Edward McLean ended after his commitment for alcoholism in 1933, and the family fortunes declined sharply through the 1930s as the Washington Post was forced into receivership and sold to Eugene Meyer in 1933 for 825,000 dollars.

Through these years McLean used her remaining gem holdings as collateral for loans and intermittently considered selling the Hope. The diamond was loaned to charity exhibitions to raise money for war bond drives during the Second World War and for veterans' charities afterwards. McLean wore it almost daily through her last years, regarding it as an emblem of family identity rather than an investment to be liquidated.

The Winston purchase and the Smithsonian

McLean died in 1947. The estate was substantially indebted, and the executors negotiated the sale of the principal jewellery. Harry Winston purchased the entire collection, including the Hope, in 1949 for approximately one million dollars. Winston subsequently broke up most of the pieces for resale, though he held the Hope itself for nearly ten years, exhibiting it in the Court of Jewels travelling exhibition that toured the United States from 1949 to 1953.

In 1958 Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution. The donation was widely publicised at the time and is generally credited with founding the Smithsonian's National Gem Collection as a public attraction. The diamond was sent to Washington by registered mail in a plain brown package, with insurance of one million dollars. It has remained in the Smithsonian's care since, and is the most-visited single museum object in the United States.

Significance for the trade

McLean's collection illustrates several themes that recur in the historical study of important American collectors. The link between mining wealth and gem collecting, the role of the great Paris and New York firms in placing important stones with American clients, and the eventual flow of those stones into public collections are all visible in her career. Her relationship with Pierre Cartier, documented in the firm's archive, is among the most fully recorded private dealer-client relationships in twentieth-century jewellery history. For the contemporary trade, the McLean Hope provenance remains a textbook case of how documented ownership history adds to the interest, and to the value, of an important gem.