The Patiala Necklace: Cartier’s lost masterpiece
2,930 diamonds, a vanishing act, and the gutted remnant that surfaced in a London shop.
In 1928 the Maharaja of Patiala handed Cartier the largest single commission in the house's history: a ceremonial necklace of 2,930 diamonds built around the 234-carat De Beers. It vanished from the royal treasury in 1948 — the second great Indian diamond to slip from a princely vault, after the Koh-i-Noor diamond was surrendered from the treasury at Lahore a century before. Half a century later, a gutted remnant — stripped of its greatest stones — surfaced in a second-hand shop in London. It is a disappearance that echoes the great diamond robberies of the modern era, such as the Antwerp diamond heist of 2003, in which a fortune in loose stones vanished without trace — or the earlier, more intimate catastrophe of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, when a 2,800-diamond collier commissioned for Marie Antoinette was stolen, broken apart, and its stones scattered across Europe.
The Patiala remains the high-water mark of signed Cartier craftsmanship — a world away from the house's later, simpler icons like the Cartier Love bracelet, yet no less coveted by collectors. For the grand tradition of stones it represents, explore our estate diamond necklaces.