Tavernier Blue

Subsequently, most scholars and historians believed that it was re-cut and, after a disappearance and reemergence into the public forum, was renamed the Hope Diamond.

[1][2] In December 2007, the French mineralogy professor François Farges [fr] found in the reserves of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle the lead model of the Tavernier Blue.

[3] The diamond was certainly Indian in origin and likely sourced by Tavernier in 1666[4] at the Kollur mine of the Qutb Shahi dynasty's Golconda kingdom in today's Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh.

[7][6] Another large blue diamond believed[citation needed] to have been taken from the Tavernier was originally set in a ring for Empress Maria Feodorovna, wife of Russian Emperor Paul I.

[citation needed] Recent American studies showing that the Hope was ‘undoubtedly’ cut from the Crown Blue Diamond[8] are therefore subject to Brisson's intrinsic errors.

Kurin in 2006 points out that these inaccuracies suggest that a reliable model of the Crown Blue Diamond needs to be known in order to definitively settle this question.

The back of the lead shows a corolla of 7 petals characteristic of the ‘Paris rose’ cut of Tavernier's blue diamond.

[11] François Farges then carried out historical research on this lead: he found in the mineralogical collections the original label of the lead, which had been donated around 1850 by the Parisian jeweller Charles Achard, who provided vital information on this mould: it stated that ‘Mr Hoppe [sic] of London ’[12] had indeed owned the blue diamond in London.