Marie Antoinette Diamond Earrings

In 1959, Post commissioned Harry Winston, Inc. to replace the remaining silver and gold settings with platinum replicas, studded with additional smaller diamonds and metal links.

Upon the sale of the earrings to the Smithsonian Institution, the additional diamonds and links were removed, though the new platinum settings and the Cartier tops remain.

[2] The earrings have been on display in the Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History for several decades.

Cartier had provided Post with documentation from Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov of Russia, from whom he had purchased the earrings earlier that year.

A portrait of Princess Tatiana Alexandrovna Yusupova, Zinaida's mother, was made in 1875 by French artist Jean-Baptiste Marie Fouque, with the subject wearing the earrings and the claim of their provenance noted by the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg.

The claimed origin of the earrings—that they once belonged to Marie Antoinette—has been investigated by scholars of the Smithsonian Institution several times in the decades after their acquisition, with inconclusive results.

Liana Paredes, a biographer of Marjorie Merriweather Post, cites Germain Bapst's Histoire des Joyaux de la Couronne de France, who in turn quotes Madame Campan, Marie Antoinette's lady's maid: "Mr. Boehmer, court jeweler, had assembled six large diamonds on order of Louis XV for [Madame] Du Barry but were not given before the king's death.