Princess Margaret — A Royal Collector with a Modern Eye
Princess Margaret — A Royal Collector with a Modern Eye
The Countess of Snowdon's jewellery, from the Poltimore Tiara to a Cartier-heavy personal collection
Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930-2002), the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, owned and wore one of the most personally curated jewellery collections in the modern British royal family. Her collection ran from inherited Edwardian and Victorian pieces to mid-century work by Cartier and contemporary commissions, and her taste, more adventurous and more design-aware than that of her sister, has been credited with shifting royal style toward the bolder volumes and brighter colours that characterise the second half of the twentieth century. The 2006 Christie's sale of her estate, conducted at the request of her children Lord Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, is the single most important data point on the value the trade places on royal provenance, and the Poltimore Tiara, the most photographed piece she owned, remains the headline lot.
The Poltimore Tiara
The tiara that defined Margaret's image was the Poltimore Tiara, a tall scrolling festoon-and-floral diamond piece made in the 1870s by Garrard for Florence, Lady Poltimore, wife of the second Baron Poltimore. The tiara was sold by the Poltimore family at auction in 1959, and Margaret bought it for her own use, reportedly for around five thousand five hundred pounds, in time for her marriage to the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones the following year. She wore it at the wedding on 6 May 1960 and at countless state and society functions afterward, and Cecil Beaton's celebrated photograph of her wearing the tiara in the bath at the Caribbean island of Mustique remains the single most reproduced image of any modern royal in jewellery.
The piece was also designed to convert into a necklace and a series of brooches, a feature characteristic of the best Victorian and Edwardian tiaras and one that Margaret used in practice. After her death, the tiara was sold at Christie's London on 13 June 2006 as lot 40 of the Property of the Late Princess Margaret sale, hammering at nine hundred and twenty-six thousand four hundred pounds against an estimate of one hundred and fifty thousand to two hundred thousand pounds. The buyer's identity was not publicly disclosed at the time of sale.
The 2006 Christie's sale
The June 2006 sale was held in two sessions over two days, with the evening session devoted to the most significant jewellery and silver and the day session to objects, furniture, and fine art. The catalogue ran to several hundred lots and the gross result reached approximately fourteen million pounds, more than seven times the pre-sale estimate. Almost every jewellery lot in the catalogue was sold for a multiple of its low estimate, and the sale set a benchmark, still cited today, for the value premium attached to royal-owned pieces of the modern era.
Beyond the Poltimore, the catalogue included pieces by Cartier, Boucheron, Van Cleef and Arpels, Garrard, and a number of British designers; a substantial group of brooches and clips set with coloured stones; pearl jewellery; and a quantity of gem-set bracelets and necklaces from the 1930s onward. The pieces with documented provenance to her parents King George VI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, or with photographic evidence of public wear by the Princess herself, attracted the most aggressive bidding. The sale demonstrated something the auction trade had long suspected: that buyers would pay a substantial premium for pieces with a credible link to a major modern royal figure, not only for pieces of historical-royal stock from earlier centuries.
Cartier and the modern collection
Margaret was a longstanding patron of Cartier, and a meaningful share of her personal jewellery, as opposed to inherited pieces, came from the firm's London and Paris workshops. Her Cartier holdings included diamond and ruby brooches, the well-known coral and diamond articulated necklace photographed in the 1970s, and a number of Art Deco-period pieces purchased second-hand or commissioned in mid-century revivalist styles. She was also a client of Wartski, the London dealers in fine antique jewellery and Fabergé, who supplied her with several Russian-imperial pieces and arranged purchases for her on the secondary market.
Her taste leaned toward sculptural form and clear colour. She wore turquoise, coral, and lapis-lazuli pieces at a time when most of the older generation of the royal family preferred diamonds and pearls, and she championed the work of British designers such as Andrew Grima and David Thomas, whose mid-century modernist gold and gem-set pieces sat happily alongside her Edwardian inheritance. The combination of inherited grandeur and modern design choice defined her image more than any single piece in the collection.
Inherited pieces and family provenance
Margaret inherited a substantial share of jewellery from her grandmother Queen Mary on the latter's death in 1953, and additional pieces from her mother Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother on her death in 2002. The Queen Mother's bequest, divided between Margaret and Queen Elizabeth II, was particularly important in shaping the late composition of Margaret's collection, although she lived only a few months longer than her mother and the bequest passed quickly to her children.
Among the inherited pieces with the clearest provenance was a pearl-and-diamond Art Deco brooch from Queen Mary, several diamond bracelets from her parents, and the so-called Cartier Tutti Frutti bracelet that Queen Elizabeth II is also recorded as having owned a sister piece to. The provenance trail through the royal family across three generations gave many lots a documented chain of custody that is unusual in the secondary market and that the catalogue at Christie's was meticulous in setting out.
The Halo Tiara and other tiara loans
Margaret was lent and at various times wore several other tiaras besides the Poltimore. The Cartier Halo Scroll tiara, made by Cartier in 1936 and given by King George VI to Queen Elizabeth (later The Queen Mother) the same year, was lent to Margaret on her eighteenth birthday and became one of her early tiara choices before the Poltimore acquisition. The same tiara was later worn by Catherine, Princess of Wales, at her own wedding in 2011. The Lotus Flower Tiara, made by Garrard from a necklace owned by The Queen Mother, was also worn by Margaret in the 1950s and is now most associated with her great-niece, the Princess of Wales.
The pattern of tiara loans across royal generations is itself a feature of how the trade thinks about royal jewellery. A piece worn at one wedding by one royal can be worn at a later wedding by another, and the documentation of those loans through photographs and event programmes builds a provenance record that has measurable value at sale.
Influence on royal style
Margaret's jewellery choices over her lifetime helped move royal style toward the bolder, more sculptural, more design-conscious side of the twentieth century. She was younger than her sister by four years, more sociable, and more closely involved with the artistic and design communities of post-war London. She wore brooches off-centre, mixed periods, and was photographed regularly in clothes by the leading designers of her generation. Where her sister's jewellery wardrobe served largely a representational function, Margaret's served also as personal expression, and the difference in approach is visible across the photographic record.
The 2006 sale captured both sides of that approach. Buyers paid a premium for the inherited and ceremonial pieces, but they also paid a premium for the more modern and personally chosen pieces, including the Andrew Grima brooches that sold for many multiples of their estimates. The catalogue effectively documented a complete personal style curated across forty years and gave the trade a reference point for the value of personal-taste provenance, distinct from purely dynastic or historical provenance.
Provenance value and the modern royal premium
The Margaret sale is now routinely cited in market commentary on royal-provenance jewellery, alongside the 1987 Duchess of Windsor sale and the 2010 Mellon estate sale. The pattern is consistent: documented royal ownership of a piece, particularly with associated photography of the piece being worn, lifts the hammer price by a multiple that the trade comfortably accepts but that is difficult to model in advance. The Margaret sale held that pattern across an unusually broad range of price points, from individual brooches at low five-figure hammers to the Poltimore at near a million pounds.
For the present-day jewellery trade, the Margaret precedent matters in two ways. It confirms that buyers will pay strongly for documented royal provenance, and it illustrates the long durability of that premium even decades after the original wearer's death. It also points to the importance of photographic documentation of wear: the Beaton image of the Poltimore in the bath at Mustique was probably worth several hundred thousand pounds to the hammer price on its own.