The McFerrin Collection — The Houston Fabergé That Rivals St. Petersburg
The McFerrin Collection — The Houston Fabergé That Rivals St. Petersburg
One of the largest Fabergé holdings outside Russia, on long-term display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science
The McFerrin Collection is the private Fabergé and Russian decorative-arts collection assembled by Artie and Dorothy McFerrin of Houston, Texas, and now displayed under long-term loan at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The collection is one of the largest concentrations of Fabergé objects outside Russia, with over 600 pieces including hardstone carvings, enamelled objets d'art, presentation pieces, and items from the Imperial Easter egg tradition. It has become the dedicated Fabergé reference collection in the United States and a standard stop for scholars and collectors of the firm's output.
The collectors and the collection's formation
Artie and Dorothy McFerrin began collecting Fabergé in the 1980s, building the collection through major auction acquisitions, dealer purchases, and a small number of private treaty deals over the following decades. The McFerrins worked with leading Fabergé scholars and dealers — Géza von Habsburg, Alexander von Solodkoff, and others — in building the collection, which gradually expanded from a small group of representative pieces to one of the most comprehensive private holdings of the firm's work.
The McFerrins' approach to collecting emphasised the breadth of Fabergé output rather than concentrating exclusively on the celebrated Imperial Easter eggs. The collection includes hardstone animal carvings, photograph frames, presentation cigarette cases, miniature hardstone figures, jewelled flowers, and enamelled boxes — the everyday luxury objects that constituted the bulk of the firm's actual production for the Russian Imperial court and the international clientele who patronised the firm's London branch.
Display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science
The collection is on long-term loan to the Houston Museum of Natural Science, displayed in the dedicated Fabergé gallery within the museum's Lester and Sue Smith Gem Vault. The gallery presents the collection in thematic groupings — Imperial commissions, hardstone carvings, enamelled objects, and so on — with substantial interpretive material on the firm's history, the workmasters who produced specific objects, and the broader Russian decorative-arts context.
The Houston display has become the principal point of public access to a major Fabergé collection in the United States. The Hillwood Estate Museum in Washington (Marjorie Merriweather Post collection), the Cleveland Museum of Art (India Early Minshall collection), and a handful of other American institutions hold significant Fabergé holdings, but the McFerrin Collection's depth and the dedicated gallery space make it the closest American equivalent to the major European Fabergé museums.
Notable pieces
Among the collection's significant pieces are several presentation cigarette cases with Imperial provenance, a number of jewelled hardstone flowers in the Fabergé tradition, and substantial groups of hardstone animal carvings — the small figural objects in jasper, agate, nephrite, and other hardstones for which the firm's lapidary workshops were famous. The collection also includes objects produced under the workmasters Henrik Wigström, Mikhail Perkhin, and others whose marks are diagnostic of high-quality Fabergé work.
Scholarly significance
The McFerrin Collection has been the subject of substantial scholarly publication, including dedicated catalogues by Géza von Habsburg and others. The collection has supported research into Fabergé production methods, workmaster attribution, and the firm's commercial history, and provides a substantial American counterpart to the Russian-language scholarship anchored in the Fabergé Museum in St. Petersburg and the Hermitage collections.