Late Nineteenth-Century Portraits Engraved on Diamond

Engraved diamonds are a rare art form, and those depicting portraits are an even greater rarity. This article highlights three extant engraved portrait diamonds from the second half of the nineteenth century, when a revival of this art form took place. The author suggests a re-attribution of the engraver of one of these diamonds (J. J. Dreese rather than M. C. de Vries) and proposes that another one, known as the `Queen Frederica diamond', instead shows the UK's Queen Victoria.