Biographical information about:

PETER CARL FABERGÉ & THE HOUSE OF FABERGÉ

Biographical & Historical Backgrounder

Peter Carl Fabergé was a gifted entrepreneur who harnessed great talents in producing beautiful and technically superb jewelry and metalwork. Although he was not active as a jeweler himself, Fabergé directed every aspect of his firm--from choosing designers and craftsmen to giving final approval to the finished works--to ensure that all commissions were executed perfectly.

Fabergé's great renown is due primarily to the incomparable series of imperial Easter eggs, generally thought to have numbered 56, created between 1884 and 1917. Ten of these eggs were crafted for Czar Alexander III from 1884 to 1894 as gifts for his wife. Nicholas II (1894-1918) commissioned 44 eggs for his mother and wife that are all still in existence, as well as two other eggs that are known only from photographs. One egg made for the year 1917, the year of the October Revolution, has survived.

Peter Carl Fabergé was born in Saint Petersburg in 1846, the first son of established jeweler Gustav Fabergé. At the age of 16, he started working for his father's firm and was admitted to the guild to work independently at the age of 21. After marrying Augusta Jakobs--they had four sons, all of whom became designers for the House of Fabergé--Carl took over his father's business. In 1882, his younger brother Agathon, who was also trained as a jeweler, joined Carl from Dresden, and it was shortly thereafter that the firm began the period of its most brilliant success.

They gained recognition rapidly, winning the Gold Medal for the 1882 Pan-Russian exhibition, where the wife of Czar Alexander III purchased one of their works. The imperial warrants of "Supplier to the Imperial Court" and "Appraiser of the Imperial Cabinet" were given to the House of Fabergé in 1885 and 1890 respectively. Receiving a gold medal from the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900 was the crowning achievement in Fabergé's career, and in that same year, he moved into a new shop in Saint Petersburg. By 1914 he was employing some 300 craftsmen in addition to the 200 who worked in the Moscow workshop, which had opened in 1887. The House of Fabergé opened branches in Odessa, London, and Kiev and, by 1908, Carl Fabergé was traveling regularly to Paris, Cannes, Rome, and the Far East to satisfy demand for his sumptuous wares. In the span of 35 years, from its 1882 Gold Medal to the 1917 Revolution, the House of Fabergé produced some 150,000 objects.

Among Fabergé's artistic achievements was the mastery of various enameling techniques. Fabergé studied the enameling of 18th-century French art objects in the treasury of the Winter Palace and used this knowledge to surpass all of his competitors in the quality and range of his enamels. His firm could render more than 140 different shades and introduced many new colors, such as oyster, an iridescent white enamel with pink undertones, similar to a mother-of-pearl, that was among the most highly appreciated. Fabergé also experimented with gold of different colors--yellow, white, green, and red--again based on techniques borrowed from the 18th century, and invented ways of achieving subtle tones of orange, gray, and blue gold.

The fate of the House of Fabergé was closely tied to that of imperial Russia during the first World War. Expensive and extravagantly jeweled objects were replaced by much simpler works made of humbler materials; moreover, most of Fabergé's craftsmen were employed making armaments for the army. After the 1917 October Revolutionthe Bolshevik takeover and later murder of the imperial familyFabergé fled to Switzerland in 1918, and died there two years later.

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ARCHDUKE DR. GÉZA VON HABSBURG

Archduke Dr. Géza von Habsburg, a great-great-grandson of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and one of the world's leading authorities on the art of Fabergé, lectured to an enthusiastic crowd at the Cleveland Museum of Art last year, when the traveling exhibition Fabergé in America premiered in New York. Habsburg returns to the museum by popular demand for the opening week of the exhibition's final venue here (March 9 through May 11, 1997). He will deliver the lecture "Fabergé: The Workshops and Their Techniques" and autograph books on Wednesday evening, March 12, at 8 pm in the museum's Gartner Auditorium. Tickets for the lecture are $5/person (tickets are free to museum members). Tickets can be reserved in advance through Advantix at 216/241-6000 or 1-800-766-6048 for a small fee or at the CMA box office beginning March 2. Remaining tickets will be available at the door.

With the recent release of once-secret Russian government documents and an influx of new information on the pre-eminent Russian jeweler and craftsman Peter Carl Fabergé, Habsburg has published various groundbreaking articles and books and has organized lectures and exhibitions around the world. The five-city national tour of Fabergé in America and the exhibition's accompanying catalogue represent his latest accomplishments.

Archduke Dr. Géza von Habsburg's expertise and knowledge of Peter Carl Fabergé began with the study of art history at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. In 1965, he earned a PhD in the History of Art, Early Christian and Greek Archeology. In 1966, Habsburg accepted the prestigious position of president of Christie's, Manson & Woods Auctioneers in Europe. While supervising this world-renowned auction house, he personally studied and garnered a wealth of information on the art and history of the House of Fabergé.

From Christie's, Habsburg moved on to the Kunsthalle Der Hypokulturstiftung, in Munich, Germany, where he served as chief curator and organizer of Fabergé, Court Jeweler to the Tsars, the world's largest exhibition of Fabergé jewelry, objects and silver, which received over 250,000 visitors worldwide.

In 1987, he founded his own auction house: Habsburg Fine Art International Auctioneers in New York and Geneva. There, he served as chairman, overseeing a growth to $80 million and a staff of one hundred worldwide.

In 1991, as director and chief curator of the Fabergé Arts Foundation, Habsburg curated Fabergé, Imperial Court Jeweler, which traveled to the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, receiving a total of more than 600,000 visitors. He is guest curator of Fabergé in America, which opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in February 1996 and is expected to draw more than 1,000,000 visitors before closing in Cleveland.

As a respected scholar and Fabergé expert, Habsburg has written and lectured extensively about the world of the legendary jeweler. His published works include: Fabergé, Jeweler to the Tsars, 1979; The Gilbert Collection of 18th-Century Gold Boxes, 1983; Fabergé, Imperial Jeweler, 1993; Carl Fabergé, 1994; Fabergé in America, 1996, the catalogue for the present exhibition; and Fabergé Fantasies & Treasures, also 1996. He continues to serve as a consultant to the art world's leading institutions on identifying and categorizing Fabergé works.

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THE INDIA EARLY MINSHALL COLLECTION
OF THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

Biographical & Historical Backgrounder

India Early (1885-1965) was raised in Columbus, Ohio, in an upper-middle-class family. She married Thaddeus Ellis Minshall, who became a successful petroleum executive, and settled with him in Cleveland in 1920. Following his death in 1930, India Early Minshall's youthful preoccupation with pre-Revolutionary Russia, shared with her husband in developing a library devoted to the subject, grew into an urge to acquire Russian artifacts available through New York dealers. Also important to her collecting were the friendships she formed through the dealers with Russian aristocracy in the U.S.

Of modest means compared to other collectors represented in Fabergé in America, Minshall bought her first Fabergé piece, a little rhodonite and enamel clock, for $250 in 1937 from the Hammer Galleries. Acquisitions of flowers and carved animals followed. The eleven-piece tea set of gilt silver and cloisonné enamel decoration she bought from Alexander Schaffer involved a record sum for her ($1,925 in 1943) until he sold her, a few months later, the Red Cross Egg for $4,400. Minshall continued to build her collection through the 1950s. Following discussions with Henry H. Hawley, longtime curator in charge of Renaissance and later decorative arts and sculpture at the museum, and then-museum director Sherman E. Lee, Minshall gave the museum her Red Cross Egg, with life interest retained, in 1963, and, upon her death in 1965, bequeathed the remainder of her collection of some sixty Fabergé works.

Hawley describes Minshall's collection in the Fabergé in America catalogue: "Though not of enormous size, Minshall's Fabergé collection includes representative examples of every significant variety of object that Fabergé made. It is the remarkable degree of concurrence of historic importance, technical quality, and beauty of the particular pieces that makes this Fabergé collection a distinguished one."

The two imperial eggs Minshall owned are the Lapis Lazuli Egg, its bright yellow enamel "yolk" containing a diamond-encrusted crown, which in turn reveals a tiny egg-shaped ruby; and the Red Cross Egg given by Czar Nicholas II to his wife in 1915. An aesthetic tour de force of Minshall's collection is an extraordinary miniature old-fashioned chair-like bidet evoking French 18th-century style, formerly in the collection of Egypt's King Farouk; its remarkable sepia and opalescent enamel paintings simulate Louis XVI brocades on the seat lid and back. The sprigs of flowers in rock crystal vases Minshall collected are considered by Hawley and others to be very fine flowers, exceeded only by Matilda Geddings Gray's Lilies of the Valley Basket. Minshall's Ladybug Box of gold and enamel with diamond eyes and outlines, though not unique in Fabergé's uvre, is one of the most charming works she acquired.

The majority of Minshall's Fabergé collection is always on view at the museum.