Newsletter 2024 Spring

“Fabergé Memorials Unveiled (1996-2022)” in the Fabergé Research Newsletter, Summer 2023 (G. Photographs and Text) contains details about the first full-size statue in Karelia for Mikhail Perkhin (1860-1903), senior Fabergé workmaster, М.П. (active 1886-1903). His workshop created Imperial Fabergé eggs from 1890-1903.¹ Perkhin was born in the village of Okulovskaya, Petrozavodsk district, Olonets province, and died on August 28, 1903, in St. Petersburg, 426 miles from his place of birth.

Valentin Skurlov, Fabergé scholar, sent an article from the Russian Jeweler, January 2024, p. 30, which reports on a December 12, 2023, landmark event in St. Petersburg. Thanks to the efforts of 12 benefactors a ceremony was held at the Cemetery of the Resurrection in the Novodevichy Convent to celebrate the grave renovation and the installation of a new Karelian stone marker (C.) honoring chief work master/jeweler from the House of Fabergé, Mikhail Perkhin, and the grave of his wife, Tatiana Perkhin.

Important details from the 2024 article:

• 2010 State permit for restoration was received to coincide with the 150^th anniversary of the birth Mikhail Perkhin and the establishment of a memorial ‘Order of Mikhail Perkhin’.
• 2011 Funds were raised for reconstruction and restoration of the Perkhin grave, and a monument constructed later in Karelia where Perkhin was born.
• September 2023 Employees of the Novodevichy Cemetery in St. Petersburg granted rights for the 2011 Funds Perkhin’s grave site to expand its care outside of its initial size. Donations were solicitated from jewelers to help in carrying out these noble affairs. As a result, the amount collected does not only allow restoration of the graves of Mikhail Evlaimpievich [Perkhin] and his family (including his wife Tatiana), the funds will take care for the grave upkeep during the next 20 years.
• On September 10, 2023 (August 28, 1903 Old Style), i.e., 120 years later after the death of Perkhin, 21 individuals, including eight guests traveling 426 miles from Petrozavodsk as representatives from the Karelian Society of Mikhail Perkhin’s Friends, arrived. (Skurlov email April 4, 2024)

ENDNOTES:

¹ Readers interested in the actual number of Perkhin eggs may wish to consult The Fabergé Imperial Egg Chronology.

Fabergé Dinosaurs Identified!

By Geoffrey Munn (UK)

A thumbnail photograph of a dinosaur described succinctly as “Nephrite”, nothing more and certainly no word of Fabergé, was included in an advertisement (A.1) for a Clarke Auction Gallery estate sale (November 7, 2021), Larchmont (NY). I instantly recognized the dinosaur as part of the treasure purchased by Wartski, the British Fabergé dealer, from the Soviet government between 1927 and 1933. Although I had never handled this little masterpiece, a 1930 archival photograph was published in my book, Wartski – The First One Hundred and Fifty Years (2015), where the dinosaur (A.2) is shown on its own, and behind a wooden packing crate.

Armed with this indisputable evidence, I alerted the auctioneers to the Fabergé dinosaur sleeping quietly in their sale and suggested they might easily nudge it into a roaring success. The only downside was the condition of this rediscovered Fabergé showpiece; the front legs had been sheared off! Perfect, it would have been extraordinarily valuable, but it was still a documentary object of great rarity, and a restoration by skillful lapidaries was certainly feasible. Fortunately, Clarke’s auctioneers had time to properly advertise the revised auction lot and the heady cocktail of fashionable dinosaur mania, mixed with the limitless fame of Fabergé, caused the news to go viral. The story was covered worldwide on social media, and even on American television. Consequently, there was no shortage of international bids and eventually the dinosaur without front legs was knocked down for $65,000 (£50,000) plus a 25% buyer’s premium¹ after a pre-sale estimate of $800-1200.

With all the excitement of discovery aside, it is time to consider the place of the nephrite dinosaur in Fabergé’s repertoire. Despite its unusually large proportions (5.5 in. wide by 4 in. high) the prehistoric animal (A.2) is not alone in the Fabergé firm’s range of hardstone models – Triceratops (B.1), Pterodactyl (B.2), Tyrannosaurus Rex (B.3), and Brontosaurus (B.4). Shown under each of the Fabergé hardstone carvings in Table B. are standard illustrations with the correct names of the dinosaurs.

In 1949, Henry C. Bainbridge, manager of the London Fabergé branch from 1904-September 1915, illustrated a prehistoric monster of similar proportions in his book, Peter Carl Fabergé: Goldsmith and Jeweller to the Russian Imperial Court³. This time the antediluvian reptile was clearly a Triceratops (B.1), but Bainbridge, evidently no palaeontologist, mistook it for a rhinoceros! Bainbridge’s book, the first published monograph on the topic of Fabergé, was written with the close cooperation of Emanuel Snowman (1886-1970), a member of the Wartski family jewelry business, who provided a good portion of the Bainbridge illustrations. The 1949 date of publication and a 1949 auction lot are circumstantial evidence that Bainbridge’s Triceratops was part of the firm’s Russian treasure acquisition in 1927 and 1933. Christie’s London, December 19, 1949, Lot 127, offered as property of a gentleman, “A nephrite figure of a Triceratops with rose-diamond eyes, 7 in. long.” Indeed, it is not fanciful to suggest this dinosaur was made by Fabergé as a companion piece to the dinosaur (B.3) which had reared its monstrous head at the 2021 Clarke Auction.

In the interests of ongoing research another equally rare animal carving is noted here. It is a Pterodactyl (B.2) carved from bowenite with ruby eyes and cataloged by Géza von Habsburg⁴ in his 1986 Munich Fabergé exhibition. Fabergé’s animal models are invariably pretty, at very least endearing, yet these three prehistoric creatures are an obvious aberration. Certainly not beautiful, their mildly aggressive, not to say threatening character, suggest they were a specific commission. But why and for whom Fabergé made them is an enduring mystery. What follows is some useful background material to these fascinating carvings which may, at very least, help put the Fabergé dinosaurs into their contemporary context.

According to the book of Genesis, God created the world in seven days and it was generally believed to be little more than 6,000 years old. In the early days of paleontology massive fossil skeletons were fleshed out as much by romantic imaginings as they were from evolving science. During the early 19^th century scientific advances began to cast doubt over traditional beliefs:

In 1822, the word paleontology was coined to describe the study of fossil remains which brought even the Holy Bible into question. On New Year’s Eve 1853, Sir Richard Owen (1804-1892), British paleontologist who invented the term ‘dinosaur’, issued invitations (printed on Pterodactyl wings!) to an inaugural dinner in the body cavity of his life size Iguanodon dinosaur. In 1854, the first dinosaur models in the world were unveiled at the Crystal Palace in South East London. On April 12, 1855, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert brought Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie to the park to see the prehistoric monsters. In 1859, Charles Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, cast doubt on creationism once and for all. Instead, the faithful were obliged to accept something equally improbable: the world had existed for billions of years and was once populated not by man, but by gargantuan monsters, the “terrible lizards” called dinosaurs.

Curiosity about the fossil past ran concurrently in Russia where in 1902 Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, the Empress Alexandra, saw the skeleton of a Diplodocus in the Imperial Museum in St. Petersburg. She was also shown the preserved remains of a mammoth. Their visit was not a great success: Her Imperial Majesty left quickly, disgusted by the stench of its rotting skin! At about the same time a flurry of publications, complete with colored plates, fired the worldwide fascination with dinosaurs. One of the more important books, Extinct Monsters by H. N. Hutchinson (lower section of B.) originally published in 1893, was translated into Russian in 1903, and a hundred years later in 2013, is searchable on the Internet in English. During 1914, it was not just the printed word which fueled the interest in paleontology, but a short silent movie directed by D. W. Griffith which, tellingly, was called Brute Force. In the opening sequences a horned dinosaur makes a brief terrifying appearance. Even in our own enlightened age a resurgence of dinosaur hysteria was whipped up by the film Jurassic Park (1993).

There seems to be an imperative in the commercial art world to trace unbroken lines of provenance and the reasons for doing so are more often commercial rather than scholarly. In fact, they offer little more than a snapshot of collectors’ taste and the justification of record-breaking prices. Art historically, it is the original patron who is the most significant player in the endless paper chase of provenance and identifying subsequent owners rarely adds much to the understanding of a masterpiece. However, a number of pioneering collectors of Fabergé are worthy of note, at the very least in mapping the roller coaster of fashion. Arthur E. Bradshaw (1879-1939)⁵ began buying in the mid 1930’s when Fabergé was distinctly passé, and he amassed a uniquely important collection fully described in my book⁶ Suffice it to say, the Bradshaw collection was nothing short of princely, both in scale and quality. In the inventory of Bradshaw’s collection more than 265 Fabergé models several pertaining to this genre (B.4) are noted. On the basis of chronology and a verbal tradition shared with me by the Fabergé specialist, A. Kenneth Snowman (1919-2002) of Wartski’s, one of Bradshaw’s dinosaurs is likely to be the Clarke Auction Gallery’s recent sale object. The hopelessly inaccurate terminology Brontosaurus used in both Wartski’s Christmas advertisement of 1933 (C.1) and the Bradshaw inventory (B.4) seem to confirm it.

The December 1933 advertisement (C.1) by Wartski London highlights a Brontosaurus dinosaur with front legs in its original condition. A question remains as to whether it is the same Fabergé dinosaur sold by Wartski in August 1937 for a hefty sum of £260, and in 2021 as a Tyrannosaurus without front legs (C.2) sold by the Clarke Auction Gallery, Larchmont (NY) for $65,000.

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I am grateful to Jane F. Allen, Richard Fallon, Géza von Habsburg, Nicholas Merchant, the late Nicholas Snowman, and our editor, Christel Ludewig McCanless, in the preparation of this article.

ENDNOTES:

¹ Monty, Kris. “Lost for 100 Years, Fabergé’s Rare T-Rex Sells for $65,000”, Antique Trader, November 17, 2021.
² Bainbridge, Henry C. Peter Carl Fabergé: Goldsmith and Jeweller to the Russian Imperial Court and the Principal Crowned Heads of Europe, 1949, Plate 26, identified the Fabergé object as a ‘Rhinoceros’. Correct identification in Christie’s London, December 19, 1949, Lot 127, Faberge ‘Triceratops‘ sold to Congreve for 105 guineas with a reference to the incorrect Bainbridge caption for plate 26.
³ Bainbridge, Henry C. Peter Carl Fabergé: Goldsmith and Jeweller to the Russian Imperial Court and the Principal Crowned Heads of Europe, 1949, Plate 26.
⁴ From the collection of Princess Margaret (1913-1997) of Hesse and by Rhine. (von Habsburg, Géza. Fabergé, 1987, p. 6, 196, #316).
⁵ Allen, Jane. “The Impassioned Collector: Arthur E. Bradshaw (1879-1939)”, Fabergé Research Newsletter, Spring 2020. Further details about the author’s book with a shortened title, see (B.4).
⁶ Munn, Geoffrey. Wartski – The First One Hundred and Fifty Years (2015) celebrates the founding of this British family firm in 1865.

Fabergé’s Use of Netsuke Prototypes

By Timothy Adams (USA)

“A Netsuke is a miniature sculpture, originating in 17^th century Japan. Initially, a simply carved button fastener on the cords of an inrō box (traditional Japanese case for holding small objects), Netsuke later developed into ornately sculpted objects of craftsmanship”.¹ Carl Fabergé’s interest in Japanese art, especially the art of Netsuke carving can be seen in his firm’s animal carvings. Over the years, he acquired a personal collection of over 500 pieces of Netsuke² from a shop in his neighborhood named Japan. A photograph of his apartment (A.) shows a cabinet with his Netsuke collection. Several popular original Netsuke objects became prototypes for the hardstone carvings the Fabergé firm produced. They include a Netsuke carving called a Fukura Suzume (B.), a round and puffy sparrow dusting itself on the ground. Fabergé’s carvers emulated this sparrow (C.) in different hardstones.

Another Netsuke theme is in the form of Sanbiki Saru, or a Mystic Ape, (D.) with feet and hands over his ears, eyes, and mouth, to hear, see, or speak no evil. The theme inspired Fabergé carvers to create one mystic ape in bowenite (E.), when the originals (F.) were carved of wood or ivory as seen in two puppies playing. Fabergé preferred to use hardstones, such as bowenite (G.), rhodonite, and agate.

Animals were a major subject matter in the art of Netsuke, but not the only one. An example is a Netsuke wood ‘pumpkin’ (H.), or more likely a Kabocha (Japanese squash), since pumpkins are only native to the Americas. It could very easily have been the inspiration for Fabergé’s nephrite gum pot (I.) owned by the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (1847-1928), and sold at a Heritage Auctions (Dallas, TX) on May 17, 2024, for $218,750.

Japanism was a strong influence in European art during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The touch of this far-off Eastern culture is seen in the decorative arts and the paintings of the Impressionists. Fabergé’s admiration of Japanese art forms did not stop at Netsuke yet extended to the arts of Ikebana and Bonsai in his floral studies. That will be left for another study!

ENDNOTES:

¹ Wikipedia
² Snowman, Kenneth. The Art of Carl Fabergé, 1974, p. 47