The Halo Scroll Tiara, also known as the Halo Tiara, the Cartier Halo, or the Halo Bandeau, is a diamond and platinum tiara made by the London branch of Cartier in 1936 and most widely recognised in the contemporary period as the tiara worn by Catherine Middleton at her marriage to Prince William on 29 April 2011. The piece is part of the British Royal Collection, on loan from Queen Elizabeth II at the time of the wedding.

Construction

The Halo Scroll Tiara was made by Cartier London in November 1936 and consists of 739 brilliant-cut diamonds and 149 baguette-cut diamonds set in platinum. The structure is a low bandeau form, designed to sit on the head rather than to rise from it, with sixteen graduated scrolling C-shaped elements arranged around the band and joined at the centre by a clasping motif. The scrolls are set with brilliant-cut diamonds; the framing is set with baguettes.

The bandeau format and the Art Deco scroll motif are characteristic of mid-1930s Cartier London production. The piece was designed under the direction of Jacques Cartier, who managed the London branch through the interwar period. The platinum mount with diamond setting represents the developed Cartier idiom of the time, with significant attention to the proportions of the curving scrolls and to the smooth visual flow of the stones across the bandeau.

Provenance

The tiara was made for the Duke of York (later King George VI) as a gift to his wife Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth (later known as the Queen Mother) on the occasion of his accession in November 1936. Three weeks after the gift, Elizabeth gave the tiara to her elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth, on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday in April 1944. Princess Elizabeth wore the tiara on multiple occasions in the late 1940s and 1950s, but it was not among her most-worn pieces and was not loaned out frequently in the second half of the twentieth century.

The tiara was loaned by Queen Elizabeth II to Princess Margaret in the late 1940s and to Princess Anne for her marriage to Mark Phillips in 1973, where Princess Anne wore it on the wedding day before changing into the Queen Mary Fringe Tiara for the wedding photograph. The tiara remained in the Royal Collection for the next thirty-eight years before being loaned to Catherine Middleton.

The 2011 royal wedding

The wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on 29 April 2011 at Westminster Abbey was watched by an estimated television audience of two billion. Catherine Middleton wore the Halo Scroll Tiara loaned by the Queen, with a hairstyle that placed the bandeau low on the forehead in the manner the design was intended for. The simplicity of the bandeau and its scale, smaller than the more dramatic royal tiaras (the Vladimir, the Cambridge Lover's Knot, the Girls of Great Britain and Ireland), suited the bride's preference for understated style.

The pairing of the tiara with Sarah Burton's wedding gown for Alexander McQueen produced one of the most photographed bridal images of the contemporary period. The choice of the Halo for the wedding rather than a larger or more historically significant piece was widely interpreted as a deliberate decision in favour of restraint and personal scale rather than dynastic display. The Queen's gift of the tiara on loan rather than as a permanent gift was consistent with the conventions of royal tiara use in the contemporary period, where most royal pieces remain in the Royal Collection.

Subsequent appearances

The Halo Scroll Tiara has not been worn by Catherine Middleton (now Princess of Wales) on subsequent occasions. After the 2011 wedding she has been seen in other royal pieces including the Lover's Knot Tiara, the Lotus Flower Tiara, and the Strathmore Rose Tiara. The Halo has remained in the Royal Collection and has not been on public display in the years since 2011. Photographs from the wedding remain the principal contemporary record of the piece, although it has been documented in earlier royal photographs from the 1940s and from Princess Anne's wedding.

Position in Cartier history

For Cartier, the Halo Scroll Tiara is a documented piece in the firm's archive and represents the bandeau format that the Cartier London workshop produced in significant numbers through the 1930s for clients in the British and European aristocracy. Many comparable bandeaus survive in private collections and in museum holdings; the Halo's distinction is that it became the most widely recognised single piece of British royal jewellery of the early twenty-first century through its appearance at the 2011 wedding.

The tiara is included in standard reference works on Cartier jewellery, including the comprehensive volumes by Hans Nadelhoffer and the various exhibition catalogues from the Cartier exhibitions held at the Metropolitan Museum, the British Museum, and the Grand Palais. The piece illustrates the Cartier London workshop's interpretation of the Art Deco style at a time when Paris was the principal centre of design and London was the secondary atelier.