Peter Carl Faberge — The Imperial Jeweller of Belle Epoque Russia
Peter Carl Faberge — The Imperial Jeweller of Belle Epoque Russia
St Petersburg goldsmith (1846-1920) whose workshops defined the apex of late-imperial decorative arts
Peter Carl Faberge was the Russian goldsmith who transformed his father Gustav's modest St Petersburg workshop into the most celebrated jewellery house of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Born in 1846 to a family of French Huguenot descent, Faberge inherited the firm in 1872 and over the following four decades built a multi-workshop enterprise of more than five hundred craftsmen producing jewellery, hardstone carving, enamelled objets de fantaisie, and the series of Imperial Easter Eggs that remain his most famous legacy. The house closed in 1918 in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and its founder died two years later in exile in Lausanne.
Training and early career
Faberge's training was unusually broad. After early instruction in the family workshop, he travelled through the major jewellery centres of Europe — Frankfurt, Florence, Paris, and London — studying historical collections and contemporary technique. A long study of the Hermitage's Scythian gold collection in the late 1870s was decisive: Faberge's restoration work on Greco-Scythian pieces drew imperial attention and seeded the antiquarian historicism that ran through the firm's output. By 1882 the workshops had won a gold medal at the Pan-Russian exhibition in Moscow, and in 1885 Faberge received the appointment of Goldsmith by Special Appointment to the Imperial Crown.
The workshop system
Faberge's commercial and creative model was the network of specialist workshops, each headed by a workmaster whose mark accompanied the house signature on finished pieces. Mikhail Perkhin and after his death Henrik Wigstrom led the principal jewellery and objects-of-art workshop; August Holmstrom and his son Albert directed the diamond-set jewellery workshop; Erik Kollin and later Alfred Thielemann ran specialised studios; Julius Rappoport produced silver. Branch operations in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev, and London extended the firm's reach. The arrangement allowed Faberge to maintain consistent house style across a wide range of techniques while delegating technical leadership to acknowledged masters of each craft.
Imperial Easter Eggs
The series for which Faberge is most widely known began in 1885 when Tsar Alexander III commissioned the Hen Egg as an Easter gift for the Tsarina Maria Feodorovna. Pleased with the result, the Tsar made the commission annual; Nicholas II continued the practice on his accession in 1894, ordering two eggs each year — one for his mother and one for his wife Alexandra Feodorovna. Fifty Imperial Eggs were produced between 1885 and 1916, of which forty-three are known to survive in identifiable form. Each egg contained a surprise — a miniature carriage, a model of a yacht, a mechanical bird, a bouquet of flowers — and each was the product of a year's labour by the firm's most senior workmasters.
Beyond the Imperial series, Faberge produced eggs for private clients including the Kelch family of Moscow, the Nobel and Rothschild families, and the Duchess of Marlborough. The Kelch eggs in particular rival the imperial commissions in technical and artistic ambition.
Technique and aesthetic
Faberge's workshops are remembered above all for the quality of their guilloche enamelling. The technique combines mechanically engine-turned metal grounds with translucent enamel applied in multiple firings; Faberge's palette extended to more than one hundred and forty enamel colours, many of them unique to the house. Hardstone carving in the firm's lapidary studios produced animal figures, flowers in rock-crystal vases, and human caricatures of remarkable precision — a body of work that drew on the Russian Imperial Lapidary Works at Peterhof and Yekaterinburg.
The aesthetic sensibility ran counter to the prevailing taste for large stones and conspicuous display. Faberge held that an object's value lay in design and execution rather than in the carat weight of its gems; he was prepared to combine precious materials with semi-precious hardstones, gilded silver, and base metals when the design called for it. The result is a body of work whose appeal rests on intellectual ingenuity and finish rather than on intrinsic material value alone.
End of the house and afterlife
The Russian Revolution closed the firm in 1918. Workshops were nationalised, stock was seized, and Faberge himself escaped to Riga and then to Western Europe via diplomatic channels arranged by the British embassy. He died in Lausanne in September 1920. His sons Eugene and Alexander reopened a small operation in Paris under the name Faberge et Cie, but the family lost trademark rights in a series of mid-century commercial transactions, and the modern Faberge brand is the property of unrelated owners.
Surviving Faberge pieces trade through specialist auction houses — Christie's, Sotheby's, Wartski of London — and through a handful of dedicated dealers. Major public collections are held at the Kremlin Armoury Museum in Moscow, the Faberge Museum in St Petersburg (built around the Vekselberg collection of nine Imperial Eggs), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Lillian Thomas Pratt bequest, five Imperial Eggs), the Royal Collection Trust, and the Hillwood Estate in Washington.
In the trade
For dealers and collectors, Faberge attribution rests on the workmaster's mark, the house signature in Cyrillic, the assay marks of the relevant city and date, and consistency of technique with documented period output. The market for Faberge has been heavily affected by twentieth-century forgery and by the practice of mounting later additions on period bodies; a confident attribution requires either provenance documentation or examination by a specialist. Wartski, which acted as agents for the British royal family in acquiring Faberge from the early twentieth century, remains a primary reference for connoisseurship.