World of Gems

Within the last 3 or 4 years, fabulous opal has been coming from Ethiopia. As is often the case with a new discovery, there was skepticism at first about the stability of the Ethiopian material - was it stable? Well after more than 3 years on the market, it has proven to be full of fire and very stable. It was very reasonably priced initially, so gems on the market right now offer exceptional value compared to Australian opal, however, don't expect that disparity to last much longer.

Then in 1726 the Portuguese found alluvial diamonds in Brazil. Once again these were alluvial deposits. The discovery was made by one Bernardo Fonseca de Lobo while playing poker with gold prospectors. For chips they used pebbles from the stream they were prospecting. De Lobo had been to India, and recognized that some of these pebbles were diamonds. He gathered up what he could and shipped them back to the King of Portugal. This created a sensation and the small town near where they were discovered was renamed "Diamantina". For the next century and a half, Brazil was the world's centre for diamond mining. Once again slavery was used to extract the diamonds, to the benefit of the Portuguese who exploited the African slaves to dig up the diamond deposits.

Perhaps the most fascinating person of that era was a black slave by the name of Xica da Silva, who became the most powerful woman in the region. Xica was a beautiful African slave who was taken as the lover of Joao Fernandes de Oliveira. Oliveira had a concession from the Portuguese crown to extract the newly discovered diamonds in the Minas Gerais state. Xica da Silva rose to power through the wealth of Oliveira created by his diamond concession. An excellent Brazilian movie "Xica da Silva" was made in 1976 and a very popular Brazilian TV series was made in 1996 about this fascinating woman.

As the end of the 19th century drew near, events across the Atlantic in South Africa were about to usurp Brazil's place as the world's diamond capital and change forever the way diamonds were found and mined.

In the middle of the 19th century, the Dutch Boers of South Africa pushed their restless search for farmland into the Northern Cape, a region of vast arid plains with haphazard rock piles known locally as Kopjes. In 1866 a 15 year old farm boy Erasmus Jacobs found a shiny pebble that was to change the course of history for South Africa and create the modern diamond industry. That pebble was a 21 carat diamond which later became known as the Eureka diamond. As is often the case, the person who discovers a significant stone, profits the least. Jacobs gave it to a neighbour, Schalk van Niekirk, who suspecting it might be a diamond handed it off to a man named John O'Rielly a travelling peddlar with an agreement that they would share the profits if sold. O'Rielly forward it to Dr. William Atherstone in Grahamtown and he confirmed it was indeed a diamond. In 1867 it was purchased for £500 by Sir Philip Wodehouse, the Governor for Cape Colony. In between, a replica was exhibited at an exposition in Paris and the diamond rush began. We all know today that De Beers is the global giant of the diamond trade, but not before the world of diamond production and exploration was revolutionized by what awaited on a few dusty farms owned by the Boers of South Africa. Ultimately it led to the Boer War, in fact there were two conflicts between the British and the Boers, the first over the discovery of diamonds and the second over the discovery of gold.

In the age of princes and kings beautiful objets carved from rock crystal were created to fufill the demand for luxury. What could be more luxurious than a decorative bowl, goblet or vessel carved from from a huge, flawless quartz crystal. In the Galerie d'Apollon, Louis the XIVth's tribute to himself in the Louvre are many stunning examples of rock crystal ojet d'arts by the Italian gem carvers that Louis installed in an atelier in Paris. No one did luxury like Louis, the self-styled Sun King and France's ruler by divine right. Louis was King of France at the height of her European power in the last half of the 17th and early 18th century. These magnificent quartz objets were mere trinkets to Louis whose idea of luxury was building the Palace of Versaille, a monument to conspicuous consumption unsurpassed today.

The collection of rock crystal objets in the Louvre is stunning and one can only imagine the size of the original quartz crystals, the time it would have taken to hollow them out and the craftsmanship and artistry of the master lapidaries and goldsmiths who created these masterpieces. When I saw them, I felt each one deserved its own case and was worthy of hours of study and contemplation. I aggregate, they are devalued by the abundance of these magnificent pieces, each one a tour de force. I suppose the Louvre is like that, because you can walk into a room of Van Gogh paintings, each of which is worth a king's ransom, or see multiple works of art by Michaelangelo or da vinci. On a relative scale, a fabulous rock crystal bowl which might sell for hundreds of thousands is still a mere trinket compared to the Mona Lisa upon which a price cannot be put. The last time it was sold was in around 1516 to Francis I King of France. He paid 4,000 ecus (about $395,000 in today's value)!