A vivid blue diamond weighing 9.51 carats and previously belonging to Rachel ‘Bunny’ Mellon, the aristocratic philanthropist and a close friend of Jacqueline Kennedy, sold in Geneva for $25 million, Christie’s auction house said yesterday.
The internally flawless pear-shaped diamond mounted at the tip of a swirling ring design is named the ‘Mellon Blue’, after its former owner who had it set as a pendant.
It sold for $32.6m in 2014, the year Mellon died at the age of 103.
That was the highest price at the time ever paid for a coloured diamond at auction, Christie’s said.
But the world record for a blue diamond is the ‘Oppenheimer Blue’, which sold for more than $57m in Geneva in 2016.
Mellon, an avid, self-taught horticulturalist, came from a wealthy background and married into the Mellon banking family.
One of her legacies was a redesign of the White House Rose Garden during the Kennedy administration, which US President Donald Trump again renovated this year.
&uuid=(email))