Christie’s will offer The Golconda Blue, the largest fancy vivid blue diamond ever presented at auction, as the headline lot of its Magnificent Jewels sale on 14 May 2025 at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues in Geneva. The pear-shaped diamond weighs 23.24 carats, is mounted in a ring by JAR, and carries an estimate of $35 million to $50 million.
The stone has a provenance rooted in Indian royalty. Yeshwant Rao Holkar, the Maharaja of Indore, was known in the 1920s and 1930s for a cosmopolitan lifestyle and a strong affinity for Western art, design, and jewellery. In 1913 his father acquired the famed Indore Pear diamonds from Chaumet, beginning a long relationship with the Parisian house, and in 1923 the Maharaja commissioned a diamond bracelet set with his own 23-carat pear-shaped Golconda blue diamond.
In 1933 he appointed Mauboussin as his official jeweler, and the firm reimagined much of his collection, creating a necklace that included the Golconda Blue and the Indore Pears, worn by the Maharani of Indore and recorded in a portrait by Bernard Boutet de Monvel. The Maharaja also worked with Harry Winston, who purchased the Indore Pears in 1946 and acquired the 23-carat blue diamond in January 1947.
Winston set the stone in a brooch alongside a matching 23-carat white diamond and sold it to the Maharaja of Baroda. He later reacquired the brooch and resold it as a newly designed jewel to its current owner. More than a century after it was first set, the diamond comes to auction for the first time, as a contemporary ring by the Parisian designer JAR.
Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s International Head of Jewelry, noted that in its 259-year history the house has offered several of the most important Golconda diamonds, including the Archduke Joseph, the Princie, and the Wittelsbach, and described the Golconda Blue as one of the rarest blue diamonds in the world. The lineage of Golconda diamonds traces back to a reference in a fourth-century Sanskrit manuscript, with Indian diamonds later chronicled by Marco Polo around 1292.
(Press Release)
