| Fabergé |
Carl Fabergé, a Russian of French Hugenot extraction, was one of the great goldsmiths. He took over his father’s jewellery firm in St Petersburg in 1870 and spent the next thirty years creating exotic masterpieces in gold, not only for the Czars but for kings and bankers from all over Europe.
The splendid Easter egg containing
the Imperial Coronation
coach, created by Fabergé in 1897 for Tsar Nicholas II
(Credit: Wartski)
The house of Fabergé eventually employed five hundred craftsmen, but Fabergé himself did the designs. His intuitive feelings for a combination of many coloured golds, using different alloys to give a range of yellow, green, red and white, was allied to a technical mastery that gave him enormous freedom in design.