Works by Russia's master jeweler light up two Manhattan shows
There is little room in today's reckoning for the gorgeous playthings that the royals and the royally rich acquired insatiably in the three or four decades before World War I. The most sumptuous, superbly crafted of these frivolities were made by Peter Carl Fabergé, jeweler to the Romanovs, whose establishment in St. Petersburg poured out cascades of baubles and bibelots for nearly 50 years before the Bolsheviks banged on the door in 1918.
That era, in all its extravagance and charm, makes an eye-and heart-catching comeback in two Manhattan exhibitions. The first, at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Design, runs through July 10; it is a handsomely displayed presentation of 213 objects from the collection of Britain's royal family and other English owners. The second, being held through May 21 by the venerable Fifth Avenue store A la Vieille Russie, is the largest collection of Fabergé ever assembled; many of the 560 pieces are being exhibited for the first time.
Fabergé, whose Huguenot family fled France in 1685, eventually presided over branches in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev and London. He was principally supported by the Romanovs, notably the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna and her son Tsar Nicholas II. The Danish-born Empress introduced the jeweler to her sister Alexandra and Alexandra's husband King Edward VII of England, both of whom became steadfast patrons of Fabergé. Most of the Fabergéana at A la Vieille Russie were made for the Russian royal family. Among them are nine imperial Easter eggs, the works with which Fabergé is most closely identified. Their design was left entirely to Fabergé, and each contained a "surprise," a splendiferous equivalent of the prize in a Cracker Jack box.
The nine include the richly ornamented Peter the Great Egg (1903) and the Mosaic Egg (1914) which is perhaps the most elegant of all. It is in the Cooper-Hewitt show and may be worth $1 million. Presented to his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna by Nicholas II in 1914, the 3⅝-in.-high egg is made of intertwining gold belts and platinum mesh set with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, topaz, quartz and garnets. The surprise inside is an oval plaque of gold, pearl and enamel on which are painted the profiles of the five royal children, all of whom were to be shot, along with their parents, by the Bolsheviks.
What the two exhibitions show above all is Fabergé's astonishing diversity. The artifacts range from relatively austere stone boxes and clocks, perfume flacons, letter openers and an art nouveau cigarette case given to Edward VII, to what Fabergé called his objets de fantaisie: a windup, tail-wagging silver rhinoceros, a love-sick frog on a silver column, and—in jade, nephrite, agate, chalcedony, quartzite and other gem stones—a dormouse out of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a litter of four sleeping piglets, and minimenageries of meticulously observed birds, fish and beasts.
Among the most consummate works are enameled sprays of flowers and fruits; to ensure verisimilitude, Fabergé kept a garden on top of his Moscow workshop. Some of these beauties, priceless today, originally sold for less than $1,000 each.