THE BRITISH ROYAL COLLECTION of works by the great
Russian goldsmith and jeweller Carl Faberge (1846-
1920) is unique. Widely recognised as one of the finest
Faberge collections in the world, it has several features that
set it apart from others and that give it an outstanding and
remarkable character.
Firstly, its size has no equal, for the collection numbers almost six hundred pieces. Size is not necessarily indicative
of importance, but the other most notable attributes of the
collection are the quality and the variety of the objects it encompasses. It is well known that Carl Faberge had exacting standards
that were rigorously applied, and pieces from his workshops
are inevitably of exceptional quality, made from the best materials by the most talented designers and craftsmen of the
time. The Royal Collection includes some of the finest examples of almost every type of object made by Faberge’s workshops from Easter eggs to animal sculptures, from flowers to
cigarette cases, from presentation boxes to bell pushes and
from cuff links to miniature furniture.
Secondly, of all collections of Faberge, that in the
Royal Collection is perhaps the best known. Works from it
have been lent to almost all the major retrospective Faberge
exhibitions held in the United Kingdom and abroad from the
1930s to the present. Two major exhibitions featuring the
collection were held at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham
Palace, in 1985-6 and in 1995-6. However, undoubtedly the
single most significant feature of the collection is the manner in which it was formed. Almost all the items in it were
acquired prior to the Russian Revolution, during the period
when Faberge’s business was at its most successful and its most
prolific, c. 1885-1917. A large proportion of the other notable
‘public’ Faberge collections – such as those at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, Ohio) and the Hillwood
Museum (Washington) – and most of the substantial private collections, such as the Forbes Collection, were formed
from the 1920s onwards when works of art by Faberge began
to appear in the West. Some were smuggled out of Russia
by emigres and sold on the open market; others were acquired
from the Russian state-run sales organisations by dealers
and industrialists from the West such as Emanuel Snowman, Armand Hammer and Alexander Schaffer. They brought
the pieces to a new audience of collectors in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The royal collection of Faberge is inextricably and
uniquely linked to the Romanov dynasty. Many pieces were
given personally to members of the British royal family by their
relations in Russia, notably the last two tsars and their consorts: Alexander III and Marie Feodorovna, and Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna. The only collections comparable in terms of scale and content were those of the Russian
imperial family themselves, which in total ran to thousands of
objects. These were confiscated and dispersed after the Russian Revolution, although there are still notable holdings in
both Moscow and St Petersburg.1
The family links were
doubly significant. The combined patronage of two Danish
princesses, Dagmar (1847-1928), who became on her marriage Tsarina Marie Feodorovna, and her sister Alexandra
(1844-1925), who became Queen Alexandra, consort of King
Edward VII (1841-1910), effectively established Faberge
as an international figure. In fact, the two Danish princesses
became the greatest publicity machine that Faberge could have
hoped for, resulting in patronage from most of the royal houses
of Europe.
There was a constant exchange of gifts between
the families for Easter and Christmas, for birthdays and other
notable anniversaries, and to commemorate occasions when
the families met in Russia, England or Denmark. As a result,
many of the works by Faberge in the Royal Collection are intimately connected to people, places and even animals of
significance to the royal family. The passion for collecting
Faberge started by Queen Alexandra and shared by King
Edward VII was inherited by two of their children, Princess
Victoria (1868-1935) and King George V (1865-1936).
The latter acquired with Queen Mary (1867-1953) the
three Imperial Easter Eggs now in the Royal Collection. These
had been commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II a few decades
earlier. The collection continued to expand with the next generation. King George VI (1895-1952) added numerous cigarette
cases and Queen Elizabeth (1900-2002) a variety of pieces
including flowers and presentation boxes. No pieces have been
added to the collection during the reign of Her Majesty
The Queen but other members of the Royal Family, for example The Prince of Wales, have acquired some works.
From the time when King Edward VII and Queen
Alexandra first became aware of Faberge’s work, the size and
scope of the collection was dictated by the pieces received
as personal gifts from their Russian and Danish relatives, their
immediate family and their friends. They also purchased pieces
for each other from Faberge’s London branch, which opened
in 1903. There was no attempt by the royal family to form a
representative thematic collection of Faberge’s work, as
certainly happened with other collections made in England
and, especially, in the United States after the Russian
Revolution. Possibly the sole exception was King Edward’s
commission of hardstone carvings of the animals at Sandringham for Queen Alexandra. The royal family’s love of Faberge
was well known in Edwardian circles and as a result of numerous gifts the collection grew rapidly in the first decade of
the twentieth century. This helps to explain why there is such
a wide variety contained within it. In addition to the largest
known holdings of Faberge’s animals and flowers, there are
Imperial Easter Eggs, boxes, frames, bibelots, desk accessories,
cigarette cases, traditional Russian objects and all manner
of practical items, luxurious women’s accessories, jewellery
and even one of the rare hardstone human figures. The only
types not well represented are the everyday silverware that
Faberge produced in large quantities – which formed the core
of his business – and fine jewellery.2
The earliest exhibition of works by Faberge to include
pieces from the Royal Collection was the Exhibition of Russian
Art held in London in 1935.3
A considerable number of objects
were lent to two exhibitions in 1949 and 1953 at Wartski,
the jewellery dealer established by Emanuel Snowman, who
brought many pieces of Faberge out of Russia from the 1920s
onwards. The first celebrated the publication of H.C. Bainbridge’s book on Faberge;4
the second The Queen’s Coronation.
In 1977 Kenneth Snowman (son of Emanuel) organised
the first major retrospective exhibition of Faberge’s work, held
in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum in celebration of The Queen’s Silver Jubilee. It included pieces from
the Royal Collection supplemented by other loans. This exhibition captured the imagination of museum visitors and as
a result, from the early 1980s, exhibitions of Faberge’s work
to which many pieces from the Royal Collection have been
loaned have been regularly organised in the United States,
Russia and all over Europe. Iwo of the Imperial Easter
Eggs, the Colonnade Egg and the Mosaic Egg (cat. 2 and
3), have each been exhibited no fewer than sixteen times.
The enthusiasm of the British royal family for Carl
Faberge’s work undoubtedly helped to ensure his international
success, but there were many other factors that contributed
to his rise to become the greatest jeweller and goldsmith of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Faberge was
fortunate in undertaking his apprenticeship in the three major
European centres of goldsmiths’ work, Frankfurt, Florence
and Paris. This gave him an invaluable insight into the materials and techniques particular to the artistic traditions in
those cities. It later became evident from his work that he had
been deeply influenced by the variety of styles in the decorative arts that he had seen during his formative years. He was
to draw on this knowledge for the rest of his career, during
which he produced modern-day objects in a range of historic styles using his own reinterpretation of earlier techniques.
This important experience, coupled with his knowledge of the
Russian decorative arts and of traditional Russian techniques
such as hardstone carving and cloisonne enamelling,5
provided Faberge with a substantial advantage over his competitors
and explains why so many of them sought to imitate his products (see pp. 243-64).
Within a few years of taking over his father’s modest goldsmith and jewellery business in St Petersburg in 1872,
Faberge had transformed it into a large enterprise consist
ing of separate workshops, each headed by a workmaster
responsible for ensuring quality, production and the recruitment of the best-trained craftsmen. In return the workmasters
were allowed to mark their products with their own initials.
Certain of the workshops specialised in particular products;
for example the workshops of Holmstrom and Thielemann in
jewellery, that of Kollin in gold revivalist pieces and Hollming’s in enamelled boxes. There were separate workshops
dedicated to the production of enamel and to the silk- or
velvet-lined fitted boxes of holly, sycamore and maple in which
each piece of Faberge was sold. Carl Faberge promoted the
best workmasters to head workmaster and from 1872 to 1886
this post was held by Erik Kollin. Michael Perchin held the
post from 1886 to 1903 and Henrik Wigstrom from 1903
to 1917. The head workmasters collaborated with Faberge on
matters of design and each had a range of distinctive styles,
but Faberge also recruited designers such as Franz Birbaum
(1872-1947), active between 1893 and 1917, and his own
brother Agathon (1862-95), who were to be influential in the
artistic direction of the firm’s products. Other designers were
involved in specific projects; for example Alma Pihl (1888-1976)
designed two of the Imperial Easter Eggs, one of which,
the Mosaic Egg, is now in the Royal Collection (see p.40).
There were also specialist sculptors such as Boris FrodmanCluzel (b. 1878) who specialised in animal and figure sculpting,
stonecarvers such as Derbyshev and Kremlev and enamellers
such as Petrov and Boitzov. Many of the craftsmen, sculptors
and designers were trained at the Baron Stieglitz Central School
of Technical Drawing in St Petersburg. The number of craftsmen employed by Faberge seems very high – at its peak around
five hundred – but it must be remembered that with a few
exceptions each object was entirely made by hand. This involved
a range of techniques and skilled craftsmen and the objects
were therefore very labour intensive to produce.
Faberge was able to keep ahead of the considerable competition in his field by constantly developing new
products in new styles and designs. If objects in a particular
style did not sell well, he had no compunction about destroying them to make way for new ranges.6
He insisted on selecting
only the very best materials. He acquired Karl Woerffel’s
stonecarving workshop – one of his main suppliers of nephrite,
jasper, rhodonite, bowenite and all the naturally occurring
stones that he regularly used – to ensure that the quality of
supply was maintained.
Works made by Carl Faberge himself are difficult to
identify, but he would certainly have been closely involved
in the production of the most important commissions such
as the Imperial Easter Eggs and also in the more complex
objects such as the flowers and hardstone figures.7
His
managerial and administrative role within the company was
central to its success and he would have dealt personally
with orders from the imperial family and other important
clients. In 1908 he visited King Chulalongkorn of Siam
(now Thailand), who had appointed him an official court
supplier, but in spite of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra’s obvious admiration of his work he was never to meet his
greatest English clients.
The firm of Faberge had supplied the Russian Imperial Cabinet (the department of the Tsar’s household dealing
with the official gifts bestowed by the Tsar) with various objects
since the 1860s but it was not until 1885 that the firm was
granted an appointment as supplier to the court of Tsar Alexander m. This was also the year in which the Tsar commissioned
Faberge to produce the first Imperial Easter Egg. Three years
earlier he had been awarded a gold medal at the 1882 PanRussian Exhibition in Moscow. Presumably in response to the
growing number of official commissions from the imperial
family, Faberge opened a branch in Moscow in 1887 which
specialised in producing silver objects. Wider recognition of
his work came with the award of the Grand Prix at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 and from that date his
business became an international concern. Branches were
opened in Odessa (1900), London (1903) and Kiev (1905).
The London branch served primarily as a showroom for the
British royal family and their circle, but it was also from this
branch that lucrative selling trips were undertaken to the Continent and further afield to India, Thailand, China and
Japan between 1908 and 1917.
Given the meteoric success of Faberge’s business, it
is noteworthy that the quality of the objects and the ingenuity and originality of their design never suffered. This serves
as a remarkable testament both to Carl Faberge personally
and to the skill and dedication of his craftsmen, and helps
to explain why his work continued to be sought after in the
West following the closure of his business by the Bolsheviks
in 1918. No new pieces were made after 1918 but many works
by Faberge began to appear on the open market in the 1920s,
brought out of Russia by emigres. Auction houses began to
organise sales of Faberge and other Russian works of art in
the late 1920s. The first in London was held at Christie’s in
1927 and included part of the Russian crown jewels. A second sale of Faberge was held at Christie’s in 1934, but the
prices realised were low. Gradually, over the next decade, more
and more pieces appeared and an enthusiasm for collecting
Faberge began all over again, stimulated by the early exhibitions already mentioned and undoubtedly by Queen Mary’s
passionate interest.
This book accompanies the third major exhibition
of Faberge from the Royal Collection, drawn entirely from the
Collection’s own holdings.8
Its aim is to display some of the
finest pieces, including important examples of the various
types and styles of object for which Faberge is renowned. The
exhibition has also afforded the opportunity to include recent
research from Russian archives into the provenance of these
pieces and to give a detailed account of the formation of
the collection through an analysis of the key collectors and
their tastes. A selection of pieces by contemporary makers,
also drawn from the Royal Collection, is included for the first
time. This is intended to place Faberge in the context of other
goldsmiths and jewellers, such as Carrier, Boucheron and
Hahn, who were active in the same period in Russia and Europe,
many of whom were profoundly influenced by his work.