BGuthrie Photos: VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

VA -- Richmond -- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. VMFAFA_141227_01.JPG: A Brief History of Faberge Gustav Faberge, a craftsman of French-Huguenot origin, founded the Faberge firm in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1842. His visionary son Carl (1846-1920) officially took charge of the family jewelry business in the early 1870s. Over the next three decades, he transformed the moderately successful enterprise into the internationally acclaimed House of Faberge. The firm's first significant breakthrough occurred at the 1882 Pan-Russian Industrial Exhibition in Moscow, when Empress Maria Feodorovna bought a featured pair of cicada-shaped cuff links. Through this connection, Faberge became Supplier to the Imperial Court in 1885 and created the first of the renowned Imperial Easter eggs. The company quickly expanded, opening branches in Moscow (1887), Odessa (1901), London (1903) and Kiev (1906). Faberge created approximately 150,000 works of art, most of them one of a kind. The craftsmanship of the silver and gold objects was matched by the firm's mastery of antique enameling techniques, as seen in several of the frames on view. Although hardstone objects were acquired from other makers and offended by the company by the 1880s, Faberge workmen began to carve hardstones themselves in 1908 -- transforming raw materials such as rock crystal, jasper, nephrite, and purpurine into cane handles, flowers and other small collectibles. By the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Faberge was the largest enterprise of its type, catering to European royalty, wealthy aristocrats, and business leaders. After Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed by revolutionaries in 1918, Carl Faberge fled to Switzerland, where he died in Lausanne in 1920. The large majority of his creations have disappeared. Some were broken up, some melted down, and some destroyed.
2. VMFAFA_141227_40.JPG: Faberge at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: A selection of objects from the firm of Faberge is on view in this gallery. Between 1933 and 1946, Lillian Thomas Pratt assembled a collection of over 400 Russian decorative arts objects, including about 170 by Faberge. Born in Philadelphia in 1876, she married General Motors executive John Lee Pratt in 1917, the year the Romanov dynasty fell. In 1933, Lillian Pratt purchased a gilded-silver and mother-of-pearl form -- the first object of her Russian art collection -- at Lord & Taylor department store in New York City. After retirement in 1937, the Pratts lived in historic Chatham Manor, across the Rappahannock River from Fredericksburg, Virginia. Lillian Pratt bequeathed her collection of Faberge and Russian decorative arts to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts at her death in 1947.
3. VMFAFA_141227_44.JPG: Faberge at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
4. VMFAFA_141227_56.JPG: Miniature Paintings: The twelve miniature paintings on ivory by Johannes Zehngraf mounted within the Imperial Rock Crystal Easter Egg depict some of Tsarina Alexandra's favorite places. For example, Neues Palais in Darmstadt, Germany, was her birthplace. Anichkov Palace, St. Petersburg, was the residence of the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, where newlyweds Nicholas and Alexandra spent their first months together. Windsor Castle, near London, was the residence of Alexandra's grandmother, Queen Victoria. Nicholas visited his fiancee, Alix (who received the name Alexandra Feodorovna when she official accepted Russian Orthodoxy), and Queen Victory at Osborne House, Isle of Wight, in 1894.
5. VMFAFA_141227_67.JPG: Imperial Easter Eggs: Faberge's greatest triumph was a series of fifty unique Easter eggs made for the last tsars of Russia. Inspired by the traditional Russian custom of giving decorated eggs at Easter, each one concealed a surprise designed to delight its recipient. Tsar Alexander III commissioned ten eggs as Easter presents for his wife, Empress Maria Feodorovna, daughter of the king and queen of Denmark. The first of these -- a white enamel hen's egg -- was presented to her in 1885. It opened to reveal a gold yolk, which contained a gold hen. Within the hen was a diamond crown and a diamond-and-ruby pendant. Beginning in 1894, Tsar Nicholas II continued his father's annual tradition by giving Faberge Easter eggs to both his mother and his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna. In all, forty eggs were created for Nicholas II. Tsar Nicholas II gave the Imperial Rock Crystal Easter Egg, in the nearby case, to his wife, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, as an Easter gift in 1896 -- just two months before their coronation. The base of the egg features colorful champleve enamel and rose-cut diamonds that form the crowned monogram of Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine (the tsarina's title before her marriage) and her later monogram as Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia. It is one of five Imperial Easter eggs in the museum's collection.
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Description of Subject Matter: Faberge & Related Russian Decorative Arts:
"When you touch or hold a Faberge object, you are in contact with something, coming down to you, not only from the era of the csars, but of an ancestry far more ancient; for it is typical of all the imperial courts there have ever been." -- Sacheverell Sitwell, 1949
Welcome. Peter Carl Faberge's first biographer published the above statement only two years after the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts began exhibiting Russian decorative arts. Sitwell understood the magic that surrounds these eggs, boxes, picture frames, cups, handles, seals, and hardstone figures with lasting appeal -- they let us reach into a past that shines all the more resplendent for its remoteness from everyday life.
Few of us get to hold one of Faberge's imperial Easter gifts, to feel the cool, self-assured enamel surface, to scrutinize the intricacies of the delicate metalwork, to count the rose-cut diamonds or cabochon rubies of seed pearls scattered like grace notes across the rounded, substantial form, and, finally, to pop open the shell and carefully extract the glittering prize. But over the past half-century, thousands of visitors to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts have touched these exquisite pieces with their eyes, owned them in their imaginations.
Now we invite you on a visual treasure hunt. A Faberge imperial Easter egg introduces each of our five themes. You will see about two hundred objets de luxe made by skilled artisans in Faberge's St. Petersburg and Moscow workshops, along with pieces created by other firms working from the early 1880s -- when the Faberge Workshops first gained international prominence -- until 1917, when Faberge closed his doors after the October Revolution.
Sometimes called "The Cellini of the North," Faberge compared favorably with the famed Italian Renaissance jeweler. Even the smallest piece of Faberge rewards scrutiny -- its craftsmanship can engage; its beauty of whimsy, delight. The extraordinary range of Faberge's production, the availability of new archival sources, and a flood of recent publications all sustain the seemingly boundless fascination with Faberge and related Russian decorative arts. It continues undiminished half a century after visitors to our galleries first encountered some of these treasures.
Lillian Thomas Pratt of Fredericksburg, Virginia, collected the majority of these works. She bequeathed her magnificent collection to the museum in 1947. Further gifts have been received over the years from other generous donors. Among our most recent additions are an important group of pieces in the Old-Russian style, given by Jerome and Rita Gans of New York, as well as a rare table and a jeweled silver frame given by the Mars family.
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