Art collector Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon’s blue diamond pendant, known as the Mellon Blue, has sold for $27.7M at Christie’s Magnificent Jewels auction Nov. 11 at the Four Seasons Hotel des Bergues in Geneva.
That’s 18 percent less than the diamond sold for 11 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, it’s a drop of nearly 50 percent in value.
The 9.51-carat fancy vivid blue, internally flawless pear-shaped diamond, which Christie’s had given a pre-sale estimate of with an estimate of $20-30 million, last sold at auction in 2014 as part of Sotheby’s sale of Mellon’s collection, where it made $32.6 million, more than double its high estimate of $15 million. According to a report in the New York Times at the time of the sale, it sold to an “unidentified Hong Kong collector,” setting the world auction record for a blue diamond as well as a price-per-carat for any diamond. The world auction record for a blue diamond has since been surpassed. In 2016, Christie’s sold the 14.62-carat Oppenheimer Blue for $57.5 million. In 2022, Sotheby’s sold the 15.10-carat De Beers Cullinan Blue, which also made $57.5 million.
Related Articles
Mellon, who died in 2014 at age 103, was heir to the Listerine fortune; her second husband, Paul Mellon, was an heir to the Mellon banking and oil fortune. At the 2014 Sotheby’s sale of her art collection, two Rothko paintings, “Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Yellow, Light Orange),” from 1955, and “Untitled” from 1970—sold for a total of $76 million.
In September, when the sale was announced, Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s International Head of Jewelry, told Town & Country, “Bunny Mellon’s legacy as a tastemaker known for designing the White House Rose Garden and curating exceptional art and jewelry elevates the Mellon Blue’s allure by tying it to her sophisticated aesthetic and cultural prominence.”
(A little primer on just how rare this type of diamond is, from Julie Brener Davich in an issue of Puck’s “Wall Power” newsletter back in September: “Blue diamonds are exceedingly rare, comprising less than 0.1 percent of all diamonds. And less than 1 percent of those can be categorized as fancy vivid.” (For the perhaps very small cross section of readers reading this and also reading or having read the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Shadow Ticket, you might recognize Fancy Vivid as the name of a minor character with a “blindingly platinum cocktail bob.”))
Today’s was a hot sale–literally. Early in the auction, the auctioneer asked a Christie’s colleague to open the window to cool the air in the salesroom.
