Queen Mary’s visits to Wartski were listed in the
Court Circular; for example on 15 November 1947 she visited the dealers at their premises at 138 Regent Street to inspect
‘some rare examples of the work of Faberge’.28
Earlier in
the year, according to the Daily Telegraph, she caused a traffic
jam when she visited the same premises to purchase pieces by
Faberge; when she emerged the crowd, who had waited two
hours, ‘surged forward, cheering and waving’. Queen Mary
also began to make loans of Faberge from the Royal
Collection. The 1935 Belgrave Square exhibition has already
been mentioned, and in 1948 she lent the miniature Louis
XVI table (cat. 245) to the Antique Dealers’ Fair and Exhibition at Grosvenor House. Six years later, after the Queen’s
death, an exhibition devoted to her art treasures from Marlborough House was staged at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Among the exhibits, arranged to correspond to the rooms
in which the Queen had carefully placed them, were three
of her most notable Faberge acquisitions: the Mosaic Egg, the
miniature piano and the carnet (cat. 3, 236 and 334).
Queen Mary’s successor in the royal family as a true
collector and connoisseur of Faberge was her daughter-in-law,
Queen Elizabeth, consort of King George VI. Queen Elizabeth formed a remarkably broad-ranging collection of paintings
and works of art of all kinds and her Faberge collection,
like many of the things she acquired, was intensely personal. King George VI had shared her enjoyment of Faberge
and formed a large collection of cigarette cases which he used
throughout his life. Several examples from his collection
are included in this catalogue (see p. 124). Queen Elizabeth’s
taste was more diverse, ranging from flowers, animals and
bibelots to superb examples of imperial presentation boxes and some of the larger silver-mounted pieces made in the
Moscow workshops such as the magnificent decanters (cat.
336). She began to form her collection in the early 1940s,
primarily through purchases from Wartski and Spink. Queen
Elizabeth also purchased a gold cigarette case from H.C.
Bainbridge, who wrote to her in 1944 suggesting that she might
be interested in acquiring it.29
She received several pieces
as gifts, notably in 1944 the charming study of cornflowers
and oats (cat. 132). Her last purchase of Faberge was the pair
of decanters mentioned above, which were bought in 1973.
In some ways Queen Elizabeth’s personal collection
can be regarded as the epitome of the vast range of styles seen
in Faberge’s work. She owned frames made of guilloche enamel,
hardstone and coloured gold desk accessories, clocks in
Faberge’s typical strut form and hardstone animals. She
also owned a number of pieces in the Pan-Slavic or Old Russian style, such as the kovshes (drinking bowls), a small bratina
(ornamental bowl) and a charming box (cat. 183). Queen Elizabeth also collected a variety of pieces by Faberge’s contemporary
St Petersburg jewellers and goldsmiths, some of which are
shown here for the first time. Her collection was for the most
part displayed in an elegant cabinet in the first-floor Corridor
at Clarence House, but in the same tradition as her royal forebears she used many pieces on a daily basis. Queen Elizabeth
was always a generous lender to exhibitions and many of the pieces from her collection – notably the imperial presentation
boxes and the two magnificent flower studies – have been lent
to a wide variety of exhibitions over the last fifty years. One
of the earliest loans was to Wartski’s 1949 exhibition; the King
lent three cigarette cases and the Queen a gold box and the
spray of cornflowers and oats. Her acknowledgement of
Faberge’s work is perhaps best summed up in something
she apparently said to H.C. Bainbridge when he was received
by the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace in 1948: ‘there
is one thing about all Faberge pieces, they are so satisfying.’30
Although no new pieces have been added to the Royal
Collection during the present reign, the traditional royal interest in Faberge has been maintained by The Queen and other
members of the Royal Family, including The Prince of Wales,
whose unusual desk seal is included in this catalogue (see cat.
301). The present reign has been marked by increased accessibility to the collection in the form of articles, books and,
principally, exhibitions in which pieces from the collection
have been included. A large number of loans were made to
the Great Britain USSR exhibition at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in 1967, at the height of the Cold War; a major part of the collection was lent to the exhibition Faberge,
Jeweller to Royalty, held at the Cooper Hewitt Museum, New
York, in 1983; and over twenty pieces were included in the
major touring exhibition Faberge: Imperial Jeweller held in
St Petersburg, Paris and London in 1993-4. In addition to the
many loans to exhibitions from the 1930s to the 1970s mentioned in earlier pages, the two most popular exhibitions to
be held at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, were
of Faberge – in 1985-6 and 1995-6, together attended by over
350,000 people.
The importance of the Faberge collection in the
context of the Royal Collection as a whole has been underlined by the inclusion of representative selections in several
general exhibitions: Sovereign, held at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in 1992 to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of
The Queen’s accession to the throne; Princes as Patrons, which
was held at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff,
in 1997; and most recently a display of over seventy pieces
in Royal Treasures, A Golden Jubilee Celebration, the inaugural
exhibition held at the new Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace
in 2002-3.
Muntian 1997, p. 330.
2 Queen Alexandra ordered that all her private papers should be destroyed after her death.
3 RA GV/GVD: 20 November 1894.
4 RA VIC/QAD: 22 November 1894.
5 RA GV/GVD: 1 December 1894.
6 RA VIC/Add A 21/200A, pp. 122, 134.
7 RA PP/VIC/Personal and Extraordinary Expenditure, 1894-8.
8 Bainbridge 1949, p. 101.
9 Op. cit., p. 100.
10 RA VIC/Add A 21/200A-C.
11 Habsburg & Lopato 1993, p. 456.
12 Bainbridge 1949, p. 28.
13 Op. cit, p. 101.
14 Op. cit., pp. 82-3.
15 Op. cit., p. 83.
16 RA GV/GVD: 3 May 1903.
17 RA GV/GVD: 25 July 1918.
18 RA GV/DD 2/Accl578.
19 Bainbridge 1949, pp. 108-9.
20 These were assembled at the Victoria and Albert Museum under the direction of Sir Cecil Harcourt Smith and bound in leather
volumes. They are entitled Queen Mary’s Bibelots.
21 Bainbridge 1949, p. 109.
22 RAGV/CC 55/243.
23 RA GV/QMD: 14 June 1935.
24 RA GV/CC 48/504.
25 Connoisseur, June 1935, vol. 95, no. 406, pp. 358-60.
26 RA GV/QMD: 31 January 1949.
27 Sir Bernard Eckstein Sale, Sotheby’s London, 8 February 1949, lot 119.
28 The Times Court Circular, 15 November 1947.
29 RA QEQM Papers. Letters between H.C. Bainbridge and Arthur Penn, Acting Private Secretary.
30 Bainbridge 1949, p. 110.