I wonder if there was some fifty to all of this - with the diamond part of the tiara having some EMF connection and then QM removing the central part to accommodate the brooches?
This thread also opens up another line of interest. Outside of the big state occasion parures I would have thought that EMF would have had some smaller tiara's for dinner parties etc. Yet I've only seen her in the larger pieces.
What a series of challengers you have posed MarcA!!
First, I would like to say that all of what you have suggested is plausible, and I certainly don't know the answer to all the various issues, although I hope I can shed some light on them by looking at the wing tiara from another angle.
1 To answer what was in the second post.
What Queen Mary purchased from Princess Nicholas of Greece in 1921 was the Vladimir tiara, which had belonged to the Princess' mother, the Grand Duchess Vladimir of Russia. Hugh Roberts provided us with all the information in The Queen's Diamonds .
Vladimir tiara
A photo was published of Queen Mary wearing it in The Times 20 June 1922.
Regarding what I call the wing tiara which Queen Mary wore with either a large sapphire brooch or the Ladies of India brooch as a centre piece.
1. We now know from a photo found by the Instagram site owner of the Jewellery of the Romanovs and posted by the owner of the Instagram site British royal jewels https://www.instagram.com/p/Bs8d9HfHty1/ that the sapphire brooch worn by Queen Mary in the tiara had been in HM's possession since at least 1911.
Similarly, we know that the Ladies of India brooch was presented to Queen Mary during the Delhi Durbar tour in 1911.
I suspect that a lot of the thinking about the origin of the tiara rested on the assumption that Queen Mary purchased the sapphire brooch from the estate of the Dowager Empress. Even if the Dowager Empress might have given Queen Mary the brooch in 1911, that does not show a link to the tiara.
If the tiara itself came from the Dowager Empress, what did it have in the centre? I think it is designed to have something in the centre but, as Mauriz once pointed out, the sapphire brooch is not a good match stylistically with the rest of the tiara. Nor is the Ladies of India brooch, although it is better.
So far we can only gauge from old photos when Queen Mary began to wear the tiara, and we do have photos from 1930. But, what if we could find evidence suggesting it was worn earlier?
The photo below, while very fuzzy and so could be anything, made me wonder if it shows the wing tiara. It was taken at the royal variety performance in London and published on 10 March 1928 months before the Dowager Empress' death in October 1928. At present it is just a query I have. A much clearer photo would be necessary to draw any conclusions.
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