Leaf-Shaped Box. The body is carved from bloodstone, trimmed in gold leaves and vines and tiny diamond berries. Fabergé, Moscow, 1899-1908. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
Egg-shaped Basket. Made of pink quartz, the basket handle is two gold serpents whose open mouths hold two pearls (one is in back, unseen). The emerald thumb piece is encircled with diamonds. Fabergé, St. Petersburg, 1886-1898. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
The Twelve Monograms Egg. One of Hillwood’s two Imperial Easter Eggs, it is covered with cobalt blue enamel, divided into sections by bands of rose-cut diamonds. Fabergé, St. Petersburg, 1896. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
Notebook (carnet de bal, or dance card) with Miniature of Empress Alexandra. The empress’s likeness is painted on enamel and surrounded by guilloché enamel, all set in gold. Fabergé, St. Petersburg, ca. 1894. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens.
Icon of the Elevation of the True Cross. The back of the icon is pale birchwood, the front painted enamel and the setting silver gilt. Fabergé, St. Petersburg, 1886-1898. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
Bell Push. An elephant carved from bloodstone stands atop a bloodstone base, its sides embellished with guilloché enamel and gold. The elephant’s eyes are diamonds, and the howdah (seat) on the elephant’s back is gold. And all this to summon the imperial servants at a push of the cabochon ruby atop the howdah. Fabergé, 1899-1903, St. Petersburg. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
Silver Cigarette Box. Most of Fabergé’s silver pieces were executed in the firm’s Moscow workshop. Fabergé, Moscow, 1914-1917. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
Cane Handle. The grip of the handle is carved from a single piece of jade; the collar is enamel on gold, trimmed in diamonds. Fabergé, St. Petersburg, 1901-1902. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
Brooch With Miniatures of Nicholas II and Alexandra. The enamel miniatures are encircled with rose-cut diamonds and joined by a “lover’s knot” of diamonds. The stone below the knot is a sapphire. Fabergé, St. Petersburg, 1899-1903. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
Notebook (Carnet) With Pencil, Fabergé, St. Petersburg, 1741-1761. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
The Catherine the Great Imperial Easter Egg. It is made in the Louis XVI style with four-color gold, plus hand-painted enamel plaques, pearls and diamonds. Fabergé, St. Petersburg, 1914. Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. / Photo by Alex Braun.
WHEN YOU FINISH ogling the gold Easter eggs and the enamel-and-gold picture frames featured in Hillwood Museum’s exhibit of Fabergé splendor, one item stands out: a bell push.
Actually, there’s more than one of them, and they are magical. The Imperial Easter Eggs get all the attention, fashioned from gold and encrusted with precious stones, generally containing a tiny “surprise”(a miniature portrait of the recipient’s children or some other intricate gilded trifle).
But the bell pushes! Looking like small boxes that might sit decoratively on a side table or a writing desk, they are fashioned of silver gilt plus enamel, or carved from a stone such as bloodstone. There is embellishment upon embellishment—one features a little elephant carved from bloodstone standing on a bloodstone base ringed with gold bands and festooning—but each is topped with a small button.
And it’s the function of the button, pushed to summon servants, that reveals the lavish life for which these trinkets were made. It’s a life that came to an end with the Russian Revolution and the murder of the Imperial family, the Romanovs. Which, of course, is how these treasures eventually came to be in the hands of collectors around the world.
Cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post—whose Washington DC home became the Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens—purchased (or received) some of the art objets that crowd her mansion in the late 1920s or early 1930s. The common assumption has been that she bought the Russian pieces while married to Joseph E. Davies, US ambassador to Russia, as Stalin’s government was selling off Romanov treasures to raise money. But official Hillwood records state that the diplomatic couple don’t seem to have bought any Fabergé while in the Soviet Union. Most of Post’s pieces were collected, the museum explains, in the 1960s, long after her Soviet interval and years after her marriage to Davies.
Even those of us with lifestyles not quite so extravagant, and whose contemporary tastes run more to, say, Pottery Barn than to Fabergé, will be beguiled by the craftsmanship that made these objects possible.
Many of the objects in the exhibit were everyday items for the imperial family—a tortoiseshell crochet hook with a gold finial! a cane handle of Siberian nephrite! a gold pencil holder trimmed in diamonds and sapphires so an empress’s fingers need never touch the wood of the pencil! Others, also made by the artisans in Fabergé’s workshops, were made as presentations, gifts of state, special commemorations and awards.
The Imperial Easter eggs are of course the ultimate expression of Fabergé. Publisher Malcolm Forbes managed to collect nine of them (Hillwood has two), which were sold off to a Russian billionaire for millions in 2004 after Forbes’s death. The Kremlin has 10, according to a Forbes Magazine article. the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts boasts five.
Yet the extravagance of the quotidian objects has a gentler appeal. They’re not quite priceless but way out of reach for most of us. Nonetheless, it’s a pleasure to visit them.
—Nancy McKeon
“Fabergé Rediscovered” is on view at Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens through January 13, 2019. Hillwood, 4155 Linnean Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20008. 202-686-5807; hillwoodmuseum.org.
