‘Rare, valuable and beautiful’: The art of replicating diamonds

For John Hatleberg, the coronavirus lockdown has been an opportunity to sit and work at what he does best — creating replica diamonds, writes Geraldine Fabrikant

The Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, DC (AFP via Getty Images)

In the midst of the pandemic, diamonds (at least newly mined ones) may have lost their lustre. But in the studio of his New York apartment, John Hatleberg is betting it will soon be back.

For months, he has been at work hunched over a gem-faceting machine, where he is cutting and polishing a synthetic material that will be used to make an exact replica of the Hope Diamond as it existed in the 17th century.

Perhaps no diamond has as much glamour as this luminous blue 45.52-carat stone, encircled by 16 white diamonds and set on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (temporarily closed). It is replete with a history of a royal owner, theft and family curses and has long been the most popular object at the Smithsonian.

But the current Hope Diamond is only the latest version of the stone. The diamond, first bought from a mine in India, was recut as the “French Blue” after King Louis XIV acquired it. Stolen during the French Revolution, it resurfaced in 1812 in London and was recut into its current style and named for its owner, Henry Philip Hope.

Having completed replicas of the original stone and the Hope itself, Hatleberg has been labouring since the winter to finish the French Blue.

He strives to assure that his replicas have the exact same angles and colour as their inspiration, a process that involved seven trips to Azotic LLC, a laboratory for gems and crystals in Rochester, Minnesota. There, experts coated and recoated the replica using a thick level of precious metals to match the lush blue of the Hope.

Hatleberg is not working for some wealthy private client who wants a knock-off for travel. Instead, his three replicas will appear next to the Hope at the Smithsonian. When?

Who knows?

 ‘An interesting shade’

The art of replicating diamonds is a delicate one, and perhaps no one has worked directly with so many named stones as Hatleberg, 63, who made a replica of the 31.06-carat Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond for Laurence Graff, the billionaire diamond dealer, and the 273.85-carat Centenary Diamond that was discovered in 1986 by DeBeers.

The Wittelsback-Graff (AFP via Getty Images)

So perfect was his copy of the Centenary that when DeBeers executives were invited to compare the two, some could not immediately tell the difference, said Rory More O’Ferrall, the manager of marketing liaison at the time.

For the Okavango Diamond Company, Hatleberg recently completed a copy of the Okavango Blue, a 20.46-carat fancy deep blue diamond found in Botswana in 2018. “We wanted a replica because we need to hold on to the legacy of the stone for future generations,” said Marcus ter Haar, the managing director of the company, which is selling the original.

A perfect replica is an art form that, for Hatleberg, can require months and even years of work. “We have had the luxury of looking at people doing that kind of work, but John is an artist with a sense of detail and perfection,” said Jeffrey Post, the curator of the US National Gem and Mineral Collection at the Smithsonian, who hired him. “When John hands me a stone, I know he has thought about and analysed it, and he would not hand it to me unless he thought it was perfect.”

For the Hope Diamond,  Post said that the difficulty was matching the colour. “It is an interesting shade, not like other shades of blue. We wanted exact replicas.” For the museum, the goal was not to sell but to help tell the story of the history of diamond. “Visitors see the sizes and shapes in a powerful way to give the history of the cutting of the stone,.” he said. “You cannot simply show a picture of a three-dimensional object.”

Most great stones attract enormous publicity when they are first brought out of the mines, cut and polished. But after the hoopla, the diamonds often disappear into coffers of the very rich, only to reappear when an auction hammer comes down on a multi-million-dollar sale. (The diamond industry as a whole has also seen critical headlines in recent decades, as human rights abuses and the trade of so-called blood diamonds have come to light.)

The Hope Diamond in a temporary setting, called Embracing Hope, in 2010 (AFP via Getty Images)

Years ago, some diamonds were bought by socialites and movie stars. American heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, the Hope’s last private owner, often wore it in public — or occasionally put it around the neck of her dog or wore it when she gardened. Richard Burton made headlines in 1969 when he bought a 68-carat diamond for Elizabeth Taylor, naming it the Taylor-Burton Diamond. Just after the actor bought it, Cartier, the seller, put it on display in New York where 6,000 people a day lined up to gape.

But in recent years, movie stars generally did not buy them, they borrowed them, said Henry Barguirdjian, a former chief executive of Graff USA and managing partner of Arcot, a gem investment firm, in an interview shortly before he died in October. “In America there are people who love to buy precious stones, but they are usually business people and completely anonymous,” he said. “In Asia they buy the way Americans used to buy: for status symbols.”

In 2015, Joseph Lau, a businessman in Hong Kong, set a record of $48.4 million (£36.3m) buying a 12.03-carat diamond at Sotheby’s called “Blue Moon of Josephine” for his 7-year-old daughter just after buying a 16.08-carat pink diamond, “Sweet Josephine,” for $28.5m from Christie’s.

The Hope, often cited as a metaphor for ne plus ultra, is unusual in that it has been on view for more than 60 years. (To be sure, both the French and British crown jewels, on public display, include extraordinary diamonds: among them those cut from the 3,106-carat Cullinan, found in South Africa in 1905, and the 105.6-carat Koh-i-Noor, found in India.)

The Hope’s path to America was circuitous. After Jean Baptiste Tavernier sold it to King Louis XIV in 1668, the Sun King ordered it recut in a more symmetric style popular at that time. It was then set in gold and suspended on a neck ribbon that the king wore for ceremonial events.

King Louis XIV of France, known as the Sun King (Getty Images)

After its disappearance in 1792 and reappearance in London, it was sold and resold until it ended up with McLean when her husband, a publishing scion, bought it in 1911. Wealthy, yes, but ill-fated. Her eldest son died in a car accident and her daughter from a drug overdose. At her death, Harry Winston bought her entire jewellery collection and in 1958 gave the Hope to the museum.

In reproducing it for the public, Post sought a sense of what the diamond had looked like in each of its three iterations.

‘Nuts about gems’

Hatleberg’s interest in such work started in childhood, when his mother was a documentary photographer for the Smithsonian’s gem collection. Growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, he recalled: “We all studied geology in school back then. People brought in crystals, agates and everything. I was nuts about gems, so my mother found a centre for retirees at a community recreation centre where there was a course in gem cutting. I loved it.”

After getting a graduate degree in sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Hatleberg supported himself doing faux finishes and other types of artisan works.

He first had access to the Hope Diamond in 1988 when he made a mould of it that he used for chocolate copies that were, for a while, sold in the Smithsonian gift shop.

Then in 2007, “I learned about a new method to colour match my diamond replicas,” he said. “Before that it was difficult to colour-match fancy coloured diamonds.” That connection was extremely valuable since coloured stones are generally the most prized.

“‘Colourless’ material gives you much less to worry about,” said John King, a former laboratory chief quality officer at the Gemological Institute of America. “The richer colours are more valuable. But when you begin to colour it and you are not satisfied with the original colour, it is a much bigger problem.”

A gem-faceting machine (Getty Images)

The process can be nerve-wracking, “We do multi-iterations,” said the president of Azotic, Steve Starcke. “It can be a little too purple or a little too blue in our initial samples. John would say, ‘Can you push it a little more in this direction?’”

Constructing how the Hope Diamond looked in its earlier lives was a sleuthing adventure. The original Tavernier stone was reimagined from drawings of the period. The second was a mystery until 2009 when Francois Farges, of the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, uncovered a long-lost lead cast of the stone.

Barbara Barrett, the secretary of the Air Force who served as a Smithsonian board member, supported the project with her husband, Craig, Post said.

Hatleberg is far from the only person creating copies. Many are made using coloured cubic zirconia. Scott Sucher, who specialises in replicas of famous diamonds, generally relies on photographs and line drawings to create his works, although there have been some exceptions. For the Koh-i-Noor, the Natural History Museum in London lent him a plaster model of the historical version of the diamond.

The whole top of the diamond was cut with angles that are less than 15 degrees. That meant the differential in the angles was tiny and hard to control

He then had it laser scanned in Antwerp, Belgium, and used that data as a guide for cutting. For a Discovery Channel programme, Sucher had access to the original and created a replica using coloured zirconia. As part of the arrangement, the Discovery Channel gave it to the museum, although it is not on display. Sucher said copies of his work were in numerous museums.

Of course, many of those are now closed.

Meanwhile, the progress of Hatleberg, who only makes moulds from the original stone and finds cutting almost as daunting as getting the colour right, has been slowed by travel restrictions.

When he made his 1992 replica of the Centenary, he went back and forth to London every two months for more than a year, he recalled. “It was extremely difficult because of the design of the facets. The whole top of the diamond was cut with angles that are less than 15 degrees. That meant the differential in the angles was tiny and hard to control.”

To get an idea of how difficult the original cutting was, DeBeers set up a special underground room in Johannesburg for a team led by Gabi Tolkowsky, the renowned diamond cutter, so as to preclude any technical factor that might interfere with the cutting. “Vibration is problematic, and the city is given to tremors, in part because of the gold mining that has taken place there,” More O’Ferrall said.

For most people, the isolation of the pandemic may have made work difficult. But aside from not being able to travel, or deliver the finished French Blue, for Hatleberg this may be the ultimate quarantine project. Even after making copies of dozens of major stones, the work has not lost its appeal. From the first, he said, he found the gems: “Rare, valuable and beautiful. They completely intrigued me.”

A diamond is forever, in other words — and lockdown is only temporary.

© The New York Times