The Hutton-Mdivani Necklace is a single-strand jadeite bead necklace comprising twenty-seven graduated spheres, ranging from approximately 15.4 mm to 19.2 mm in diameter, unified by a ruby-and-diamond Cartier clasp of the Art Deco period. It is widely regarded as the finest jadeite bead necklace in existence: each bead displays the saturated, vivid green known in the trade as imperial jade, combined with an exceptional degree of translucency and an internal texture — the characteristic interlocking fibrous structure of jadeite — that imparts a luminous, almost living depth to the stone. When the necklace was offered at Sotheby's Hong Kong on 7 April 2014, it sold for US $27.44 million (including buyer's premium), establishing a world auction record for any jadeite jewel and for any single-strand bead necklace ever to appear at public sale. The figure remains a benchmark against which all subsequent jadeite jewellery is measured.

Gemmological Character of the Beads

Jadeite — the sodium aluminium pyroxene NaAlSi₂O₆ — is the rarer and more commercially prized of the two minerals that share the trade name jade, the other being nephrite. Imperial-green jadeite derives its colour from trace chromium, the same element responsible for the red of ruby and the green of emerald. The finest material is simultaneously intensely saturated in hue, highly translucent (approaching the semi-transparent), and free of the grey or brown modifying tones that dilute lesser stones. In the trade, this combination is sometimes described by the Cantonese term feicui, meaning kingfisher feather — an allusion to the iridescent blue-green plumage of the common kingfisher, long prized in Chinese decorative arts.

The beads of the Hutton-Mdivani Necklace satisfy all three criteria at an extraordinary level. The colour is a pure, vivid green without perceptible grey or brown modifiers; the translucency is such that light penetrates the full diameter of beads approaching 20 mm — a diameter at which most jadeite becomes visibly opaque; and the surface, polished to a high lustre, reveals the subtly mottled, interlocking grain that distinguishes natural, untreated jadeite from the glass-smooth uniformity of polymer-impregnated material. Sotheby's engaged the Gübelin Gem Lab and the GIA to examine the beads prior to the 2014 sale; both laboratories confirmed the jadeite to be natural and untreated — what the trade designates Type A jade, meaning neither bleached nor polymer-impregnated nor artificially coloured. In material of this size and quality, the absence of treatment is itself exceptional, since the vast majority of commercial jadeite undergoes at minimum a wax or polymer treatment to stabilise surface fractures.

The graduated arrangement of the beads — largest at the centre, diminishing symmetrically toward the clasp — follows the classical convention for important bead necklaces and serves a practical optical purpose: the eye reads the necklace as a coherent whole rather than a series of individual stones, and the colour appears to intensify at the centre where the largest beads concentrate. The total length places the necklace at the collarbone when worn, the traditional position for a prestige jade necklace in both Chinese and Western jewellery culture of the early twentieth century.

Provenance: Barbara Hutton and the Cartier Commission

The necklace was assembled and sold by Cartier, Paris, in 1933. The precise circumstances of its assembly are characteristic of the great Cartier jade commissions of the interwar period: the maison acquired individual jadeite beads — almost certainly sourced from Burma (present-day Myanmar), the only significant source of gem-quality imperial jadeite — and matched them for colour, translucency, and diameter before stringing them on a single strand with a clasp designed in the Art Deco idiom. The clasp, set with rubies and diamonds, is itself a minor masterpiece of the period: the pairing of vivid green jadeite with the red of Burmese ruby and the white of old-cut diamonds was a chromatic formula that Cartier had refined across a decade of jade jewellery production.

The first recorded owner of the completed necklace was Barbara Hutton (1912–1979), the American heiress to the Woolworth retail fortune and one of the wealthiest women in the world at the time of her inheritance. Hutton was a significant Cartier client throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and her acquisition of the necklace in 1933 — the year she turned twenty-one and came into her full inheritance — was consistent with the scale of her jewellery purchases during that period. The necklace was a wedding gift: Hutton presented it to her close friend and confidante Princess Nina Mdivani upon Nina's marriage to the American golfer Alexis Mdivani. The Mdivani family — Georgian aristocrats who had fled the Bolshevik revolution — were fixtures of the international social world of the 1930s, and the gift of a Cartier imperial jade necklace of this calibre was a gesture commensurate with the extravagance of the era.

The necklace thereafter passed through the Mdivani family and descended through Nina's line, remaining largely outside public view for the better part of eight decades. Its reappearance at auction in 2014 was therefore an event of considerable significance to the gemmological and collecting communities: a piece of this quality, with this provenance, had not been available on the open market within living memory.

Art Deco Context: Cartier and the Jade Moment

To understand the Hutton-Mdivani Necklace fully, it is necessary to situate it within the broader cultural and commercial phenomenon of Art Deco jade. The period between roughly 1910 and 1940 saw an unprecedented Western appetite for imperial jadeite, driven by several converging forces. The fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 and the subsequent dispersal of imperial Chinese collections brought quantities of the finest Burmese jadeite onto the international market for the first time. Simultaneously, the Art Deco aesthetic — with its appetite for bold colour, geometric form, and non-European material culture — found in jadeite a perfect vehicle: a stone that was simultaneously exotic, chromatically intense, and available in large, workable pieces.

Cartier was the pre-eminent Western interpreter of this moment. Under the direction of Louis Cartier and with the creative contributions of designers including Charles Jacqueau, the maison developed a distinctive vocabulary of jade jewellery that combined Chinese jadeite with Indian-influenced gemstone settings — what Cartier called the Tutti Frutti or garland aesthetic — as well as more purely geometric Art Deco compositions. The acquisition of jadeite was itself a significant commercial undertaking: Cartier agents travelled to China and to the Burmese jade markets to source material, and the maison maintained relationships with Chinese lapidaries who could cut and polish jadeite to Western specifications.

The bead necklace was the supreme form in this tradition. Unlike carved jadeite — pendants, bangles, figurines — a bead necklace required material of consistently high quality throughout, since each bead was fully exposed and any variation in colour or translucency was immediately apparent. To assemble twenty-seven beads of the size and quality represented in the Hutton-Mdivani Necklace would have required access to an extraordinary quantity of rough material; the matching alone would have taken considerable time and expertise. This is why great imperial jade bead necklaces of the Cartier period are so rare: the material requirements were simply beyond what most commissions could satisfy.

The 2014 Sotheby's Sale

The necklace was offered at Sotheby's Hong Kong on 7 April 2014, as part of the maison's Magnificent Jewels and Jadeite sale — the principal annual venue for important jadeite jewellery in the global market. Hong Kong is the natural centre for imperial jade trading: the city is home to the world's most sophisticated jadeite dealers and collectors, and the Cantonese-speaking community of southern China and the diaspora has maintained an unbroken cultural and commercial relationship with imperial jade that gives Hong Kong buyers a depth of connoisseurship unmatched elsewhere.

The pre-sale estimate was HK $100–200 million (approximately US $13–26 million at the then-prevailing exchange rate), itself a figure that acknowledged the necklace's exceptional status. The hammer fell at a price that, with buyer's premium, translated to US $27.44 million — approximately HK $214 million — surpassing the high estimate and establishing a new world record for jadeite jewellery at auction. The previous record, also set at Sotheby's Hong Kong, had been held by a jadeite bangle.

The result was significant beyond the headline figure. It confirmed that the market for the finest imperial jadeite had not only recovered from the disruptions of the 2008 financial crisis but had reached a new plateau, driven by mainland Chinese demand and by the growing recognition among international collectors that untreated imperial jade of this quality is, in practical terms, irreplaceable. The Burmese mines that produced the material for the great Cartier jade commissions of the 1920s and 1930s continue to operate, but the production of rough jadeite of sufficient quality to yield beads of this size and colour is, by all accounts in the specialist literature, far below what it was a century ago.

Significance in the Jadeite Market

The Hutton-Mdivani Necklace occupies a position in the jadeite world analogous to that of the Mogok pigeon-blood ruby or the Colombian muzo emerald in their respective markets: it is the reference object, the piece against which all other examples of the type are measured. Several features contribute to this status.

• Scale: Twenty-seven beads, the largest approaching 20 mm in diameter, all of consistent imperial-green colour and translucency. Necklaces of this length and bead size in untreated material are extraordinarily rare.
• Treatment status: Confirmed Type A — natural, untreated — by two of the world's leading gemmological laboratories. In a market where the majority of commercial jadeite is treated, untreated material of this quality commands a categorical premium.
• Provenance: Assembled by Cartier in the Art Deco period, owned by one of the most celebrated jewellery collectors of the twentieth century, and preserved in essentially original condition including the original Cartier clasp.
• Auction record: The US $27.44 million result is the highest price ever achieved for a jadeite jewel at public auction, and among the highest for any single-strand bead necklace of any gemstone.

The necklace also serves a pedagogical function in the gemmological literature: it is the standard illustration of what imperial jadeite can be at its absolute finest, and images of its beads appear in discussions of jadeite colour grading, translucency assessment, and the distinction between treated and untreated material. For any student of jadeite, familiarity with the Hutton-Mdivani Necklace is as fundamental as familiarity with the Hope Diamond is for students of coloured diamonds.

Current Whereabouts

The identity of the buyer at the 2014 Sotheby's sale was not publicly disclosed, as is standard practice for major auction purchases. The necklace is understood to be in private hands. Whether it will appear at auction again, or pass into a museum or institutional collection, is unknown. Given the trajectory of the imperial jade market and the irreplaceable nature of the material, any future appearance at public sale would be expected to attract significant international attention.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology — coverage of the Hutton-Mdivani Necklace and jadeite grading
• GIA: Jadeite Jade — properties, origins, and treatments
• Lotus Gemology: Jadeite — origin determination and treatment detection