Fabergé's Eggs by Toby Faber

Author:Toby Faber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588367075
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

In the fifty years before his death Carl Fabergé had created the largest jewelry firm in the world and had overseen the production and sale of hundreds of thousands of objects. They ranged from the humble silverware of middle-class tables to the necklaces of empresses, from comically squat animals to ethereal flower stems, from cigarette cases, umbrella handles, vases, picture frames, fans, bell pushes, paper knives, and clocks to tables and bureaus, vodka bowls, and crucifixes. They were carved, turned, enameled, chased, gilded, painted, cast, blown, spun, and wrought, decorated in styles from prehistoric Scythian, through classical, baroque, rococo, and traditional Russian to twentieth-century art nouveau, and made from hard stone, gems, base and precious metals, wood, glass, leather, and cloth. Much of this vast output may be in questionable taste, and its variety is almost unimaginable, but what made Fabergé’s achievement truly awe-inspiring was its one point of uniformity—the skill and unerring attention to detail with which every piece was made, expressed in a consistency whose most remarkable quality was that it could be taken for granted.

Carl Fabergé died without knowing what had become of this enormous legacy. Most of his creations had never left Russia. Now they were lost to the Communists. Above all, he would never know what had become of his firm’s supreme creations, the fifty imperial Easter eggs given to Alexandra and Marie Fedorovna, in which his designers’ imagination and workmasters’ ingenuity had been given their fullest expression. By newly written law, the eggs were now owned by the state: a few days before the Yekaterinburg massacre, a decree had formally confiscated and nationalized the property of the deposed emperor and his family. As for the eggs’ location and condition little was known.

The omens were not good. A year before Fabergé’s death Alexander Polovtsov, a well-known connoisseur and one of the early Bolsheviks’ more unlikely collaborators, had published a record of his experiences during the eighteen months after the fall of the czar, when he and a few quixotic companions had done what they could to preserve Russia’s artistic treasures. The resulting book, Les Trésors d’Art en Russie sous le Régime Bolcheviste, gave a remarkable contemporary account of what was happening to Russia’s czarist heritage during the chaos of the revolution.

In March 1917 Polovtsov had responded to Nicholas’s abdication by quitting his job at the foreign ministry to do what he could to safeguard the contents of royal palaces that had suddenly lost their owners. With two colleagues he began by making an inventory of Marie Fedorovna’s summer palace at Gatchina, where he found more than four thousand paintings, including several old masters. Then Polovtsov turned his attention to Pavlovsk, an exquisite palace near Tsarskoe Selo that had hardly been altered since the eighteenth century and was now home to a junior branch of the imperial family. By October 1917 he was sharing in the general concern that as the Russian army collapsed, the Germans might arrive in Petrograd within weeks. Two trains loaded with treasures from the Hermitage Museum had already left for the relative safety of the Kremlin.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.