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FAMOUS COLOR
Step into the great room housing the Smithsonian Institution's gemstone exhibit any day of the week-and you'll see a familiar scene. One display always draws a special crowd. It houses one of the most famous diamonds in the world, the Hope.
A similar story is true at the Dresden Historical Museum in East Germany. Only there the display houses the Dresden
Green. The common link-apart from the extraordinary beauty of their color-is that both were mined in India.
The fabled dark-blue Hope is surrounded with legends of misfortune and disaster in two royal houses. This 44.52-carat diamond, now on permanent display in the Smithsonian Institution, is believed to be the larger portion of a stone originally sold to Louis XIV of France in 1668. It was stolen in 1792 during the French Revolution and never recovered. The diamond in its present form was bought in 1830 by Henry Philip Hope (for whom it is now named).
It remained in the Hope family until 1908 when it was acquired by Abdul Hamid 11, Sultan of Turkey. Later owners were Pierre Cartier, Edward B. McLean (then owner of the Washington Post), and Harry Winston, who donated the diamond to the Smithsonian in 1962. The Dresden, a 41-carat applegreen stone, began its march to celebrity in 1743 when Frederick Augustus 11 of Saxony bought it at the Leipzig Fair and added it to his nation's crown jewels. The lovely, pear-shaped stone, the largest of its color in existence, continued as part of the Saxon Regalia for some 200 years but was confiscated by the Russian Trophies' Organization in 1945. The Soviets returned it two years later and it now is displayed in the Dresden Historical Museum.
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