There are engagement announcements and there are engagement announcements where the groom made the ring himself using porcelain fired in his ceramics studio at his Sussex property, and Samuel Chatto, the great-nephew of the late Queen Elizabeth II, has produced the second kind, announcing today his engagement to Eleanor Ekserdjian, an abstract painter and film artist, in a coupling of two people whose professional outputs are, respectively, ceramics and abstract painting, which is either the most creatively compatible match the extended Royal Family has produced in some time or a very specific dinner conversation.
Chatto, 29, is the son of Lady Sarah Chatto, the only daughter of Princess Margaret and the late Antony Armstrong-Jones, making him a cousin of both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Sussex. He keeps a ceramics studio in Sussex where he makes his work, and where he made the engagement ring, which is porcelain, which is a choice that reflects either deep artistic conviction or a willingness to give a ceramicist’s answer to a question that jewellers have been answering in gold and diamonds for centuries. Per GB News, which broke the news today, the King has been made aware of the engagement and “is very pleased for the pair.”
Ekserdjian attended the Royal Family’s Christmas Day celebrations at Sandringham in 2024, per GB News, making her only the second unmarried partner to receive such an invitation after the Duchess of Sussex, which is a comparison the announcement does not dwell on but which GB News notes anyway. Her father, Professor David Ekserdjian, is a distinguished art historian and Professor of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester, making this an engagement in which one family’s contribution is the late Queen’s bloodline and the other’s is academic art history, and the ring is porcelain because someone in this equation is a ceramicist.
The wedding is planned for spring next year. Lady Sarah Chatto and her husband Daniel are described as naturally thrilled. The King is very pleased. The ring is a piece of pottery made by the groom in his Sussex studio, which will be the most unusual sentence in the Sandringham Christmas briefing this December.
When the great-nephew of the late Queen announces his engagement with a ring he threw on a wheel in his own studio, what exactly is the jewellery industry supposed to do with that?
Sources
GB News: King Charles delighted as Samuel Chatto and Eleanor Ekserdjian announce their engagement
