‘Met diamanten omset’: Hoop Rings in the Northern Netherlands (1600-1700)

In 2018 the Rijksmuseum acquired a gold ring from the first half of the seventeenth century set with nineteen table-cut diamonds. Although this type of ring appears in several pendant portraits from the Northern Netherlands, physical examples are extremely rare. Only one other example is known aside from the one in the Rijksmuseum’s collection. Archival material and contemporary dictionaries have revealed that in the seventeenth century this type of ring was known as a hoop ring and that it differed from other rings because of its shape. The hoop ring is an uninterrupted circle that became inc... Mehr ...